


Babylon

by MargaritaDaemonelix



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Androids, Biocybernetics, Cybernetics, Dubious Science, F/F, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Human Experimentation, Multi, NaNoWriMo 2020, Neuromancer fusion, Nonbinary Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc, This apparently, but not dubious consent!, what happens when you let a science kid take too many english courses?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 42,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27362737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MargaritaDaemonelix/pseuds/MargaritaDaemonelix
Summary: She's everywhere and nowhere all at once: in a pachinko parlour during the graveyard shift, at a street market eating skewers, on a stool at the bar playing with the USB that dangles tantalizingly from her neck. Maybe cyberspace, where she can't go, where she can't run to—maybe that's her paradise lost, what keeps her here in the present and stops her from running.Three would-be Lucifers, cast from heaven. Byleth presents them with a problem, and a solution. /Neuromancerfusion AU.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Edelgard von Hresvelg, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Edelgard von Hresvelg & My Unit | Byleth & Claude von Riegan, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth, Edelgard von Hresvelg/My Unit | Byleth, Minor or Background Relationship(s), My Unit | Byleth & Sothis, My Unit | Byleth/Claude von Riegan
Comments: 17
Kudos: 38





	1. jackpot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edelgard breaks company policy for the prettiest girl she has ever seen.

In the employee registry, Edelgard’s name is followed by a string of numbers. A small mercy for those who choose to leave their families and legacies behind, and a bigger one still for those who don’t even have that luxury. She clocks in at 8:01, writes it down as 8:00, and signs her name not with a flourish but with a scrawl.

The guy with the afternoon shift before her is only visible to her as a string of numbers too. Makes sense, since not a lot of establishments in the inner city hire vanished folks like them. The pachinko parlour is a rare exception. Edelgard isn’t even sure the manager is human, but from the few texts she’s exchanged with her coworker, she figures at least he’s like her, living in a shitty overpriced matchbox and eating convenience store food most days and having terrible luck with dating apps.

 _EDELGARD,_ says the thumb reader in its pleasant monotone, _020501-1162-0623._ She doesn’t move, just grits her teeth as the robotic arm comes down and affixes her nametag to her shirt, unhooks the keys from her belt in the same fluid motion it takes to hook them when she clocks out later. There’s some irony to being the only human employed in a building full of machines, and yet still being expected to be as inhuman as they are, neat and perfect and catering to the every need of the customer.

She steps out from the staff room, a powerless lord surveying her neon lands. Lights at 65%, machines on, drinks being served by chirping robots with LED emoticon faces. The constant rattle of payouts being made; _congrats, you won fifty balls! Aw, you missed the jackpot, better luck next time!_ all in the same greedily cheerful siren voice; the greeter robot at the door thanking another customer for their patronage, and welcoming the next in.

There is a girl at one of their oldest machines, the one that never works, and she has a near-empty bin of the little silver balls that Edelgard has come to hate so much. The bin rests across her knees, suspended on the lace tights that strain against her thighs. She is completely and utterly transfixed on the game before her; Edelgard is completely and utterly transfixed on her.

For the first time in Edelgard’s career at the parlour, the ancient machine lights up. The girl swipes her bin up and shoves it under the payout, just in time for the flood. The entire machine rattles, hacks, and coughs up the jackpot, bloodied with rust and other vintage viscera.

The girl shakes the bin a little. The balls clatter. She sets it aside, satisfied, and turns her attention back to the machine at hand, _OUT OF ORDER_ sign utterly ignored. A lonely ball rolls from the payout and hits the ground with a muffled scuff, a distance away. Edelgard stops it with her foot before it can roll under another machine.

“I believe this is yours,” she says in her best customer service voice, presenting the ball to the girl at the machine. She tears her eyes away from the rickety screen for just long enough to drown Edelgard in the dancing teal of her irises. “If there’s anything I can help you with, please let me know.”

She doesn’t get a smile back, but there’s neon pink and green dancing across the girl’s face with the whirr of nearby machines, and the corners of her eyes crinkle in just the right way, and Edelgard feels like she’s floating on nothing, like the world is hers again and she’s plugged deep into her thoughts with electricity running through her veins—

The payout funnel shoots something around ten balls out into the bin, splutters tragically, and wheezes on empty. An itty bitty red light starts flashing on the side of the machine, indicating that it needs to be reloaded. “Oh,” says the girl, taking her hand off the knob. It creaks as it springs back to neutral. “Whoops.”

“I’ll refill it immediately,” Edelgard assures her hurriedly, and then freezes. “Er, perhaps not immediately. The machine is old, and I’m afraid we haven’t gotten a replacement yet. I can move you up in the line for the next available—”

“No need. I can wait… Miss Edelgard.”

The way she says it sends a shiver down Edelgard’s spine. Hers isn’t a common name; she remembers reading it for every new teacher she had as a child, _eh-dul-gard,_ one syllable after the other. This girl sounds so eloquent—like she’s been practicing every syllable of Edelgard’s name for this moment of customer interaction, with the faintest hint of a smile that can only accompany mischief.

“I’ll let you know when the next machine is available,” Edelgard blurts, and makes a mad dash for the staff room.

It’s only the beginning of her shift. This is desperately unfair to her, she who goes weak in the knees for pretty eyes and strong thighs. She takes a moment to compose herself, recall that she is an _employee,_ and when that doesn’t work, she cracks open the bottled bergamot tea she’d picked up after her shift at the convenience store earlier. Like most convenience store drinks, it is overwhelmingly sweet, and tastes mostly of sucralose with only an afterthought of bergamot.

One of the monitors starts beeping to let her know she’s used up her break time. She sighs and leaves the staff room behind.

The pretty girl has moved away from the old pachinko machine, and the sign has been replaced. Edelgard makes a note of telling corporate (for what, the fourth time?) to ship the new machine in, as she approaches the pretty girl with a voucher from her pocket. “For your troubles,” she says, once again plastering on the customer service smile. Vouchers are poison, she knows. They keep people coming back, and by god, does she want this girl to come back.

“I couldn’t possibly,” the girl says, crossing her legs as though they couldn’t seem any longer. “I can wait, don’t worry.”

“Waitress,” some other patron yells, “waitress, the machine only gave me twenty four balls.”

There’s already an apology on Edelgard’s tongue as she turns around, though she’s not sure to whom. The rest of the night blurs like that: spilled drinks and steel balls, and an endless stream of customers both inside the parlour and out. Edelgard knows well that those outside probably won’t make it in before closing, that they’ll give up after ten minutes because the satisfaction not coming is not satisfaction at all, and really, they could just hit up the huge chain store two blocks down, with their franchise machines and better prizes and flock of cute staff workers in itty-bitty pencil skirts.

And between the shouts of spoiled brats and famished addicts, the pretty girl sits in the waiting area by the door, curled up in the fake leather as though it’s her throne, bathed in green by the strobe lights overhead. She fiddles with something at the end of the lanyard hanging from her hip, hidden by the swing of her unzipped letterman jacket. When another patron leaves, Edelgard gets a closer look at the object in question—a blue USB drive, accented in black and gold. Probably some modifier for her rig that she keeps on her person.

So the night passes in a haze. Edelgard resolves problems and converses politely with all the regulars and directs the few newcomers to the trade-in counter, and when her shift ends at two in the morning and she’s ushered the last customer out, the pretty girl is gone. The lights die down as the cleaning robots emerge to take care of the trash and fallen pachinko balls, and Edelgard stands in the middle of their warpath, feeling utterly drained. The machines power down one by one, and soon it’s just her in the middle of the carpet, walking between rows of the sleeping. She runs her hand over cold plastic, and exhales.

She’s alone.

The thumb reader beeps as it always does when she clocks out. It does not offer a _good night_ when it removes her nametag and returns her keys. “Good night,” she tells it anyway.

In response, the thumb reader powers down. Edelgard collects her bag from the staff locker and takes her wadded-up hoodie out. The buttons on her staff uniform catch on her hair, tugging it from its ponytail; she slips the hoodie on, and ties her hair back up, tighter than before. For good measure, she throws the hood over that, too.

Wonder of wonders, the pretty girl is waiting in the smoking area just outside the building, staring at the towers of cold glass and colder steel that close in. She is not smoking, nor does she look like she intends to. She doesn’t carry a bag, or a backpack, or (more sensibly for a woman this late at night) a weapon. The blue USB hanging from her lanyard is in her hand again, like a plaything juggled between her long fingers.

She waits for Edelgard to lock up, blinking owlishly as Edelgard wrangles her ring of keys. “Someone coming to pick you up?” she asks, and _oh_ how beautiful her voice is now that it isn’t being interrupted every other second by the endless rattle of a payout.

“No,” Edelgard says truthfully, though she knows that’s dangerous for a young woman in this part of town, and really, she shouldn’t trust a complete stranger like this. It’s like she’s caught in some siren’s song, guard let down completely and heart laid bare. “I usually just walk.”

The key catches in the lock with a _click._ She stares at it, and turns it experimentally to find more resistance. “Huh,” she says, and wriggles it out. Nothing wrong with the key; she runs the pad of her finger over all the ridges, and there’s nothing stuck between those either. “Sorry, I’ll just be a second—”

With no warning whatsoever, pretty girl drops into a squat, peering into the lock, and extends her hand. Edelgard doesn’t even think before placing the key into her palm. “Why not a digital lock?”

Edelgard shakes her head. “Can’t buzz,” she whispers.

It’s a vulnerable thing to admit, and maybe that’s why Edelgard works the night shift at a near-defunct pachinko parlour. It’s ‘88, who _can’t_ connect their mind to the the Field? Hell, if Edelgard could buzz into the Field, she’d quit both her part-time jobs and work from home, just like she’d wanted to as a girl. How often has she longed for a slightly larger apartment, a decent rig, a life that doesn’t require her running around the city day after day? A job that returns her to the static and the dynamic peace of cyberspace?

Frustration rises in her throat like bile, choking out the beating of her heart. There aren’t many places to go for those locked out of paradise, and Edelgard refuses to let herself sink into hell. So here she is, trapped in the limbo between the pachinko parlour and the convenience store. It’s not a very nice place to be. At least the food’s decent.

To her surprise, pretty girl nods. “Me neither,” she says. “Had a heart defect when I was born. You?”

“Uh, got sick when I was eighteen.” Not eloquent, but not a lie, either. “Nice to know I’m not the only one.”

The lock clicks into place, and pretty girl rocks on the balls of her feet and stands back up. “You were never the only one,” she says sincerely, leaning in against Edelgard. The ghost of a smile graces her lips; it’s a good look on her. “There’s more of us, you know. If you’ll have us.”

She presses the keys into Edelgard’s hand, and her fingers linger a moment too long against the pulse of Edelgard’s wrist. “Will you be safe going home?” she asks, as though Edelgard’s the customer stumbling out of the pachinko parlour drunk on neon and steel at two in the morning. “I can call a taxi, if you need.”

Edelgard shakes her head. “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” She pauses, and some cruel, laughing part of her summons the cheesiest pickup lines from the darkest parts of her memory. “But you could call me later.”

Pretty girl studies her closely, like she’s a specimen in a glass case. “That I could,” she says, and without hesitation she tips Edelgard’s chin up and kisses her ravenously, as easy as breathing.

“The cameras,” Edelgard gasps when they break away from each other, “surveillance. My manager is going to—”

“Don’t worry,” pretty girl says, as though her very real concern is just amusing. “Smoking area’s out of the line of sight, I checked.” She raises an eyebrow, and _oh_ how Edelgard drowns in her eyes. “But if you’re worried about that, we can find somewhere else.”

“That would be great,” Edelgard says, and kisses her again.

* * *

Edelgard thinks, as far as long-term romantic partners go, she’s not a bad one, but she’s had some pretty awful luck over the years. Her first “boyfriend” was Hubert, when they were exceptionally dumb kids; that had lasted all of a week, because neither of them knew what dating was. Then again, it wasn’t like they had very good role models, with Edelgard being a barely-legitimate child and Hubert’s father entertaining lovers left and right.

She’d dated a girl named Bernadetta in high school for several months. Bernie was the cute and skittish to Edelgard’s graceful and headstrong, and they were happy in the way only high school sweethearts could be. Edelgard has fond memories of their almost weekly bubble tea dates, where she _insisted_ in a very lady-like fashion on paying, and Bernie _insisted_ on drawing her several portraits in manga style to repay her. The last Edelgard had seen of the other girl was right before Bernie’s father discovered she was _dating,_ heaven forbid, and moved her to an all-girls high school abruptly in the middle of the school year.

Then Dorothea, who she’d met right before she was supposed to start university. Dorothea had pretty eyes, too, and strong thighs and deft fingers and a pretty mouth that was just as pretty when it sang opera in the theater as it was against Edelgard’s skin. She’d tried to visit Edelgard in the hospital after the incident; they wouldn’t let her in. She’d helped Edelgard find an apartment and move out afterwards, too.

When her alarm wakes her up, Edelgard finds that the girl from the night before is gone. She sits up, and her hair spills onto her bare breasts, hair tie still barely holding on as the thin blankets tumble away. She plucks it off; there’s no salvaging her hair now, not without a decent shower.

A quick scan of the room yields very little: barely decorated, save for the TV on the rickety cabinet, and an artfully abstract canvas hung haphazardly on one wall. A table covered in Edelgard’s clothes, the edge of her work bag peeking out from underneath. One threadbare couch, where she’s pretty sure the pretty girl pushed her into the cushion and kissed her senseless the night before. A small door that leads to a bathroom.

That’s something she can work with. She rolls out of bed and every inch of her aches: for a painkiller, for touch, for release. The carpet crunches underfoot and stabs her toes, which is a sensation only preferable to the shock of cold tile in the bathroom. It takes half a minute for the water to run warm enough to stand in, which is bad but still better than her apartment.

Under the shuddering spray, Edelgard grieves the loss of warmth. This isn’t her first hookup since she moved to Remire, but it’s definitely the first one that’s convinced her to spend the night at some sketchy motel in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with a complete stranger. There are bruises trailing up the inside of her thigh like the flight of a purple butterfly, and a sting across her decollete.

In a word, messy.

There are, as expected, no hair products available in the bathroom. A wrapped bar of sample-sized soap sits in the soap holder on the wall, which she uses to scrub down what she can. The bruises are starting to hurt, so she glosses over those with a gentle hand, and tries to forget the feeling of lips and teeth and tongue there.

This is, of course, when her phone starts buzzing relentlessly. There’s no salvaging her hair at this rate, so she rinses it down as best she can and wrings the water out with a towel. She emerges naked and steaming from the shower, and with no consideration for anything as trivial as clothes scoops her phone off the nightstand and glares at it.

There are two text notifications; the first one is from the afternoon shift guy. Edelgard only knows he exists because he saw her empty bergamot tea bottle in the recycling at work, and was kind enough to purchase one for her and leave his number with it. _A fine choice of drink,_ he’d claimed. _Do you consider yourself a connoisseur of tea as well?_

She laughs a little to herself as she cracks open the texting app. While she’d turned down his offer of a date (claiming privacy issues), they’d kept in touch over the little things: theorizing over the nature of their manager, which local bakeries had sales, his ever-growing string of bad first dates. She wouldn’t be surprised if his most recent texts are about this, too.

> _(06:34) f: The second date didn’t go so well ):_
> 
> _(06:34) f: Are you still asleep? Don’t you have a shift at 7:30?_
> 
> _(06:37) e: jeez, I was in the shower_
> 
> _(06:37) e: what happened this time_
> 
> _(06:38) f: ):_
> 
> _(06:38) e: stop making frowny faces at me that’s not going to help you get a boyfriend_
> 
> _(06:39) f: ): ): ): ):_
> 
> _(06:40) e: oh yeah question_
> 
> _(06:40) e: is it against company policy to sleep with a customer_
> 
> _(06:41) f: HELLO? OF COURSE IT IS?_
> 
> _(06:42) f: But then again, when have you ever paid attention to company policy?_
> 
> _(06:42) f: … How were they?_
> 
> _(06:43) e: very good_
> 
> _(06:43) e: but she left before i woke up so idk_
> 
> _(06:43) f: ):_
> 
> _(06:43) e: oh for the love of_

She tabs over to the next text before he can send her any more frowny faces. This one’s a bit more urgent, it seems—maybe she should have responded to it first.

> _(02:37) Mina: El, are you on your way back?_
> 
> _(02:38) Mina: El…_
> 
> _(03:00) Mina: I’m going to sleep, and if you don’t text me back by morning I’m coming out to look for you._
> 
> _(06:44) El: mina i’m alive_
> 
> _(06:44) El: sorry for not responding i was uh_
> 
> _(06:45) El: occupied_
> 
> _(06:45) Mina: Oho?_
> 
> _(06:45) Mina: I will forgive you this once, then!_
> 
> _(06:46) Mina: But stop making this a habit._
> 
> _(06:46) Mina: I am going the fuck back to sleep._
> 
> _(06:46) El: aye aye ma’am._
> 
> _(06:47) El: enjoy your sleep_

Edelgard tosses her phone into the bed and begins the unenviable task of collecting all her clothes. Her knickers are the easiest to locate—kicked to one side of the bed, the pink cotton stands out against the dark wood. Her hoodie is draped over her work bag, and a quick scan of that turns up her convenience store uniform shirt as well as the rest of her belongings. After some consideration, she shakes out all the covers, and finds her socks and jeans in a scrunched up ball at its foot.

“Oh, the miss you were with paid on her way out,” says the woman at the front counter when she asks. "She left real early, too."

"Any idea where she went?"

"Nope. Can't see out the door from my seat." She then kicks up her heels on the counter and swipes up a fashion mag from somewhere on her desk, which Edelgard takes to mean that she's been dismissed. "Nice doing business with ya."

At some point during the night she must have told the pretty girl where she needed to be come morning; the motel, fittingly named _ROADSIDE MOTEL_ (though only _DSIDE MOTEL_ is lit up on the giant neon sign) is only a block away from the 24-hour convenience store where she works in the morning. There are few people actively in the store at this hour, most of whom are picking up a breakfast for the road. A few white-collared men and women wordlessly exchange money for cigarettes and vapes. Edelgard tries her best not to stare at them.

There are only so many vices she can indulge in on a limited budget, after all. She picks up a random onigiri from the fridge— _pickled plum,_ the package tells her, _a fresh, tart flavour. Try all our flavours today!_

She’s tried all the flavours. At least this one doesn’t dry her mouth out. She throws open the drinks fridge and snags a bottle of bergamot milk tea. The rest of the bottles lurch forward to take itself place, a row of endless soldiers marching towards their death.

The cashier on shift _(Rudy,_ his nametag says) looks significantly more awake than she feels when he scans her onigiri and bergamot tea. "Good morning," he says, far too chipper for this hour. “Ready for the day?” Edelgard grunts. "That'll be 640 gold, please." 

In another life, she'd just tap her wrist against the darn reader and call it a day. She was, what, fifteen when her father let her hook her bank account to her fingerprint? Now, with no accessible bank to her name, she yanks a handful of change from the pocket of her unwashed jeans and dumps it into the register. It rattles and spits out a few coins in return, already purring as it prints out her receipt.

“Rudy”, if that even is his name, dumps the change and the receipt in Edelgard’s open palm. “Enjoy,” he says, but she’s already taking her food to the seating area by the door. The seaweed crinkles loudly as she tears off the strip of plastic down the middle and disassembles the wrapper methodically: left side free, right side free.

She crams the onigiri in her mouth and the plastic wrapper in her hoodie pocket, and cracks open the bergamot tea. The plastic breaks with a satisfying _ker-crack,_ almost loud enough to mask over the sound of her phone buzzing with another text notification. Either the afternoon shift guy, or one of her convenience store coworkers asking her to take over their shift, or (god forbid) Carmina calling her for an emergency, though Edelgard doesn’t think that last one is too likely.

When she hauls her phone out from the back pocket of her jeans, she’s greeted instead with a text from an unfamiliar number:

> _(07:13) Unknown: Sorry, don’t have a calling plan._
> 
> _(07:13) Unknown: You can text me, though. - b_

A moment passes, and then another. Edelgard is faintly aware that the onigiri is probably going to drop, and handles that problem with a solid bite of crunchy seaweed and rice before she texts back.

> _(07:14) e: sounds like a plan, miss b_
> 
> _(07:14) b: Haha. Plan indeed._
> 
> _(07:14) b: Sorry I left so early. My job needs me to stay on the move._
> 
> _(07:15) e: oh yikes, and here i was thinking my shifts were early_
> 
> _(07:15) b: I’ve gotten used to it._

The onigiri crumples in her hands. She wads it up in the seaweed and shoves the rest in her mouth. There’s no one else in the seating area, and really, it’s a straight view, so she leaves her bag behind and goes for the hot food counter. Usually, someone’s manning the station; with Rudy so occupied at cash, she snags a pair of tongs and helps herself to a fried chicken cutlet from the hot food bin, and checks it out as usual.

> _(07:265) e: have you had breakfast?_
> 
> _(07:26) b: Yeah, cup noodles. You?_
> 
> _(07:27) e: i had an onigiri from Anna’s and now i’m eating fried chicken_
> 
> _(07:27) e: not a conventional breakfast, i guess_
> 
> _(07:28) b: No, definitely not conventional._
> 
> _(07:28) b: Though I suspect neither of us have time for such niceties as proper breakfasts._
> 
> _(07:28) e: i mean, an egg here and there couldn’t hurt, i guess_
> 
> _(07:29) b: Gotta get that protein._

There’s a knock on the table in front of her. Edelgard looks up to find Rudy looking apologetic, both hands clutched around the shaft of the broom. “Your shift,” he says, sounding guilty as he does. 

She can’t imagine the goofy smile that must be on her face. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a second,” she says, waving an errant hand. The rest of the fried chicken she scarfs down in three bites; the tea, she takes a swig of, and puts the capped bottle back into her bag. Already there’s a small line forming at the cash register.

> _(07:30) e: my shift’s starting_
> 
> _(07:30) e: i’ll talk to you later?_
> 
> _(07:30) b: Sounds like a plan. See you later._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is 11:55 pm and i have no fear of god because i'm on my reading week  
> hi, friends, welcome to another round of "Marg challenges nanowrimo because her hubris outweighs her common sense". the context for this year is that i took a very cool english course last year and we studied William Gibson's _Neuromancer_ and it like, pun intended, rewired my brain. if my classes don't kill me, expect updates every few days or so? yeah sounds cool  
> i can't count change. talk to me about japanese cash registers and konbini onigiri  
> EDIT (2020-11-17): changed date for continuity, fixed some spacing issues because who knows HTML? not me that's for sure


	2. broken thermos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dimitri chases ghosts and fairy tales and runaway lanyards, and samples Dagdan street food while he's at it.

There’s a sickly young woman who visits Dimitri and Dedue’s vegetable stand in the morning market about once a month. The first few times she came, she’d only caught the very last of their sales, and looked so sad when all she could get was a few measly bok choys. After that, Dimitri started reserving a little bag of the fresher stuff for her, even though Dedue says not to play favourites.

He’d thought, at first, she’d been a traveller or something, until he realized that her hair wasn’t so much bunched under her beanie as it was straight-up not there, and that the reason she always pushed her scooter around (despite the bike rack at the front of the market!) was due to the the oxygen tank she’s always hooked up to. The watch strapped haphazardly to her thin arm beeps incessantly like a bomb, heartbeat blipping across the cracked screen in pleasant harmony.

“I’m shopping for my sister,” she says when Dimitri asks. “She’s constantly working for my pacemaker and treatment, and yours are the freshest veggies. It’s worth the trip from the inner city to get here.”

“I’m honoured,” says Dimitri, who is well aware that a journey from inner Remire out into the suburbs is a matter of maybe a few minutes by commute, and a few hours by foot. The web of tubes feeding in and out of the oxygen tank would never make it onto the train; briefly, Dimitri wonders what her sister would do knowing she’s wandered this far out of the nest.

She makes her purchases, and takes a minute to balance the broccoli crowns and early strawberries in her basket. Not for the first time, Dimitri wishes he could give her a bag, but it’s not like he’d know where to get them from, anyways. With a smile and a wave, she’s off, and the handful of gold in his pocket has never felt heavier.

Most of the regulars come and go after that. In the few years since they moved here, Dimitri and Dedue have built up something of a reputation as the local greengrocers, even though all they’ve got to work with is the little patch of rooftop garden at the top of their apartment complex. Grandparents bring their grandchildren to the morning market on weekends. Dedue’s far better with the kids, but Dimitri has the advantage of looking like a pirate and being able to go still enough to let kids climb all over him, which is admittedly a little unfair. All the grandmas and grandpas in the neighbourhood coo over  _ the nice young man who does the gardening, _ and of course  _ his roommate with the eyepatch, what a sweetheart! _

(It’s true, Dimitri supposes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting.)

He hears the elevator rattle from the eighth floor down, and awaits the muted  _ ding! _ when Dedue steps out bearing today’s lunch. “She came again,” Dimitri reports.

“You’ll get those sales out easier if you don’t keep half our produce under the tarp,” Dedue warns, but it’s all in good humour. Dedue’s never been the kind to push a joke too far, after all.

Maybe that’s why Dimitri listened to him so closely after the incident. Dedue had been working the security detail that day and Dimitri had been talking to his parents and Glenn Fraldarius about the recent negotiations with Leicester Industries when six armed men had blazed in and promptly opened fire, and fire it was—hell, they’d barely left bodies behind. Afterwards the first responders pulled him and Dedue both from the wreckage, and when Dimitri asked him in the hospital what to do and where to go Dedue had just said  _ let’s go away, away from here, _ and he’d listened and made it happen. Away they went. It had taken Dimitri an embarrassingly short period of time to sell his apartment and play dead to the rest of the world.

Fhirdiad stopped feeling like home real quick after that. Dimitri’s phone wasn’t among the casualties that day, but he left it on the nightstand one morning with over six hundred notifications and missed calls, and it ran out of battery and got swept in with his receipts and papers, crumpled into various balls and paper airplanes.  _ What do people usually keep in their nightstands, _ he remembers asking. Dedue had shrugged and said,  _ their ghosts? _

So Dimitri banishes the ghosts to the nightstand drawer, along with most of his regrets, semblances of common sense and that one pair of scissors he broke and can’t bring himself to admit having broken. In their place he fills his days with watering cans on the roof and tomatoes from the garden and the mason jar that Dedue fills with layered rice and beans for lunch. As they sit on the curb and Dimitri pointedly averts his eyes from the clump of cigarette butts in the drain, Dedue hands him his lunch, and they toast their containers and dig in with plastic takeout spoons, because Dimitri can’t be arsed to go get normal silverware.

“Lizzie was asking where you were,” Dimitri says, poking at a particularly large kidney bean with his spoon. The skin on the bean peels back to the touch, revealing the grey mush underneath. Like his words, it tastes of sawdust. “Her grandson is still scared of me.”

Dedue laughs. “She worries for you. I think she sees you as another grandchild.”

“Getting adopted by the old folks in the neighbourhood wasn’t on my to-do list.”

“Embrace it.” He pops another bite of beans and rice in his mouth, and points at Dimitri with a tumeric-stained plastic spoon. “The old folks in the neighbourhood think you’re not eating enough. I agree with them.”

“I am at a healthy BMI, Dedue.”

“BMI isn’t always accurate,” Dedue insists. “Have you heard of the small plate theory?”

Dimitri’s spoon bends against the side of his thermos. “I have, I think. You eat less when you have a smaller plate, or something like that. I thought dietary scientists disproved it years ago.”

“Well, yes, but we can apply the same principle here.” Dedue gestures with his mason jar that displays each layer of his lunch through the glass: kidney beans in tomato stew, turmeric rice, white rice, canned tuna, two slices of luncheon meat. “If you eat with a larger vessel, you may feel inclined to eat more.” He stares pointedly at Dimitri’s faded cartoon thermos, but doesn’t press further. Sometimes, Dimitri wishes he did.

The street market continues on its merry way as they eat. Somewhere down the cul-de-sac, the guy who sells squid skewers (heaven knows where he’s getting the squid from) has set up his stand. Dimitri has had the squid twice; the first time years and years ago, when they moved here, when Dimitri was at his lowest and most worried about spending his quiet fortune, and once—

“You’re thinking about her again,” Dedue notes with quiet amusement. He lets his spoon clatter into his now-empty mason jar and caps it tightly. “Your Cinderella.”

“She’s not my Cinderella.”

“Well, she’s certainly not Sleeping Beauty. And she survived the apple, so she’s not Snow White, either.”

Last week, a girl had wandered up to their stand when they were closing up, eating a candied apple on a stick. She’d stared at the empty bins on their folding table for a solid minute while crunching on sugar dyed bright red, and Dimitri had watched a lanyard drop from her belt in slow motion and caught it before it could fall into the sewer grate. He’d tracked her down through the crowd to return it, leaving behind a very confused Dedue to clean up alone. She’d bought him  [ a squid skewer ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i16ka8UzFno) as thanks and another one for herself, and then she’d pulled him into an empty alleyway where she’d kissed the barbecue sauce from his lips and tugged at his collar with eager hands.

She hadn’t left her name, or a number, or anything really. Dimitri is half certain he’d hallucinated her entire existence, except for the very brilliant green flecks within the teal of her eyes. Try as he might, there is no way his mind could make up a pair of eyes so beautiful.

Dedue, as Dedue tends to, listened to him rave about the experience in the morning, and then began his week-long crusade of harmlessly but relentlessly teasing Dimitri about it. To be fair, Dimitri thinks he kind of deserves it.

(But then he remembers the way she’d felt in his arms, the way her lips were against his, the way her shirt rode up her abdomen and how cold her skin was against his—)

The thermos lid screws on just a little bit too far in his hands, just enough to hear the damning  _ crack _ that splits the neon blue plastic. “Fuck,” Dimitri mutters, as the lid falls apart in his hands. “I—uh, god. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t worry,” Dedue says, extending his hand. Dimitri puts what’s left of the thermos jar in his palm, and he shoves it in his bag as he stands up. “I’ll clean up the stand. You can go get rested for if your Cinderella comes back tonight.”

Dimitri socks him very gently in the arm. 

“Ow,” Dedue says, but he’s grinning.

* * *

Dimitri dreams of cyberspace.

He used to do that a lot when he was younger, as though it was some kind of fucked-up Tetris effect. When his father bought him his first rig at thirteen, he’d spent a day and a half straight in the Field, poking sleeping dragons and playing mind soccer before he’d been discovered and subsequently grounded. Maybe it was the novelty of cyberspace that made it so appealing, made the dreams almost as vivid as the real thing.

Nowadays he firmly categorizes it as a nightmare, for all that he longs for it. In the dream, he is alone, his conscious suspended in a shape vaguely reminiscent of him. The world manifests before him in neon colours, exploding into numbers and ideas and data, and all he can think is  _ away, away from here _ as Dedue tugs him out from the web of growing red by the hand. In the peripherals of his vision Glenn and his father are screaming, louder and louder.

And of course he knows this is false, that this is some kind of adverse reaction that his mind is having, so he shifts gears.  _ Reality is under your control, _ says the voice of the therapist Dedue made him go see about the data ghosts.  _ Stay in reality. _

Dimitri wakes up. The apartment is rattled, as it is most nights, by Dedue’s snoring. The clock on the nightstand reads  _ 01:42, _ far too early to be awake, but far too late to be asleep. He doesn’t think people should be awake at this hour, but some people are, it seems: the street below is lit up, and when he leans over the balcony he can hear EDM playing from a few apartments down.

_ Stay in reality. _ The reality is this: Dimitri left home four years ago, never to return. For all that the suburbs are quiet, he quite likes them—the apartment complexes average less than twenty floors, and the number of nightclubs-per-capita is somewhere in the thousandths instead of the tenths. This is the kind of place where Dedue grew up, Duscur-before-it-was-Kleimann, paved over as yet another sacrifice to build outwards before skywards.

He hasn’t been to the night market too many times over the years, mostly because of the smoke and the sound and the people. Sure, the food’s amazing and he’s met all flavours of people there, but then he wakes up with a pounding headache and a burn in his chest that might be shame, and Dedue always looks like he doesn’t know what to do with him afterwards. An opportunity cost, really, of simulating cyberspace for crowds who can’t go there themselves.

If Dimitri had to recreate the Field himself, he’d start with the colours. The cul-de-sac, home as it is, fails to achieve this point. It is gray and drab to the brilliance of cyberspace.  _ A communal hallucination, _ his father had called it, probably quoting this newspaper or that novel. Constantly in flux to match its inhabitants, from the simplest browsers to the darkest denizens.

Someone whistles below. Dimitri nearly topples over the balcony as he stares down six storeys and sees a head of teal and a waving hand. “Well?” says the girl from last week, already armed with another candy apple.

Dedue remains asleep throughout the time it takes for Dimitri to get dressed in something that isn’t a ratty old pair of sweatpants and a rattier t-shirt. He grabs his hoodie on the way out, and for good measure tries to tie the hair out of his face in the dark of the mirror by the door. It still falls in his face, but he’s too far gone to care now, barely refraining from slamming the door on his way out.

Cinderella, indeed.

She’s already polished off most of the apple by the time he gets downstairs, and barely has a core left to show of it. “What was it this time?” he asks as means of greeting, breathless from running down six flights of stairs.

“Caramel.” As if to prove her point, she licks what’s left of it off her lips, and tosses her apple core. It sails through the air in a perfect arc and bounces off the brick wall into the garbage can. “You took your sweet time.”

“The elevator was occupied.”

She graces this with a hum, taking his hand and dragging him forward. Despite the rest of her being borderline frigid, her hands are warm against his, though so,  _ so _ small—barely large enough to grasp across his entire palm, more akin to the children holding onto his thumb as they pull him into their dancing-circles in the street. Some clock in his heart ticks— _ 01:59, 02:00, 02:01— _ but at this point he’s already drunk on the colours, on the warmth, on the way her index finger is wrapped in a childishly pink bandage.

“What do you want to eat?” she asks, dragging him further out still. The glow of a 24-hour Anna’s haunts the windowpanes of the first-floor apartments, red upon white upon red again. “The squid guy has curry spice today.”

“Anything you want,” he answers, as though he knows what there is to try out. She nods, and takes him sideways, diagonal, over and under. The people and scents and ideas seem to blend together into the night, and for a moment it does feel like cyberspace again, with this girl leading him fast enough that the data ghosts can’t linger for long enough to catch up. Somewhere, music plays—it’s synth this time, he thinks faintly—but he only hears the afterthought of it, and lets his heart sync to the beat by itself.

“Here,” she says, and his feet heed the unspoken command and stop. This isn’t the squid guy; this is a table with a line a mile long behind it, and he can’t see what’s at its very end. “I think you’ll like this.”

“I can’t taste anything,” he tells her. “So really it’s all the same.”

She stares up at him, and in that moment he sees cyberspace in her eyes: boundless, infinite, explosive. “You can taste them through me.”

In the crowd they must just look like any other young couple at the night market, though really Dimitri doesn’t think they qualify as a couple of any sort. A couple of strangers, at best; the girl remains an enigma, and he still doesn’t know her name. It’s like a puzzle, or perhaps a ring-stacking toy made for small babies, but all the rings are done in the wrong order, and the tower comes precariously close to crashing down at any moment.

“Where do you want to go after this?” the girl asks, and Dimitri is violently shaken into reality and unreality all at once. “There are seats at the convenience store,” she clarifies, looking amused if anything at the shock that must line his face. “Or we can sit on the curb if you want.”

Dimitri dimples. “The curb sounds good.”

The people in the queue before them shuffle forward, and they follow in turn, one step at a time. The girl doesn’t seem cold, despite how thin her clothes are: cropped t-shirt, high-waisted shorts, lace tights, ankle boots. Her hands are still impossibly warm against his. “So,” he says, or tries to say, “what are we waiting for?”

“A few friends,” the girl says, “but also you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.” She leans against his shoulder, or at least she would, except she only comes up to his arm, so when she leans it’s really into his elbow at best. “Are you ready to go new places?”

Dimitri blinks a few times, unsure of the sudden contact and the proposition. “I’m… not sure. I’ve got a life here, you know.”

“But you’re missing so much of Remire.” Another step forward in the line; Dimitri can smell something like scallions frying. “If you take the train downtown you’ll see so much more.”

He shakes his head. “Not an urban person.”

And maybe that sets her off, because she looks at him with those beautiful owlish eyes, and she says, “were you not?”

It’s an innocent-enough question, and Dimitri is about to make a fool of himself chasing its tail when the line shuffles again. “Okay, really,” he says, “what are we getting?”

She gestures at the man cooking. “See for yourself.”

Dimitri squints. The chef spreads some kind of batter on a massive round griddle, and with a tool and an expert hand spreads it thin, thinner. “A crepe?” he asks, wincing as the man  [ cracks an egg directly onto the crepe and pokes the yolk loose with the tool ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVNfaPOl0ME) . “A savoury crepe.”

“It’s Dagdan,” she says, still fixated on the chef’s busy hands in childish wonder, just the way Dimitri watches her and wonders what stroke of cruel fate brought him here. “Are you allergic to anything?”

“No.”

The chef scatters chopped scallions all over the half-cooked egg, scrapes the entire crepe loose off the griddle, and flips it with his bare hands. It lands squarely back in the middle of the griddle and begins to sizzle loudly. Without any hesitation, the chef swipes a brush covered in some dark sauce over it and tosses on two pieces of crispy fried dough that crack when he folds the crepe edges over them and folds the entire thing in half like a sandwich. Money changes hands, the crepe is shoved in a paper bag, and the line shuffles forward once more.

Overhead, a giant sign dangles the words  _ DAGDAN CREPES, _ painted bright red and rimmed in white. In retrospect, this makes a lot more sense. “Have you been to Dagda?” he asks.

She nods. Somehow, this is unsurprising. “Business trip a few years back,” she says.

“Oh, yeah? What kind of business?”

“Merc work with my dad.”

That’s the line that somehow slams him in the face more than anything else, though really there isn’t a single dull moment next to her. Maybe it’s because the girl looks so small next to him that it’s hard to imagine her as a mercenary in any context. Fortunately, he doesn’t get the chance to make a fool of himself speaking about it—”two,” she tells the boy manning the cash bin, and waits for change and her two servings of crepe. “Here, take this.”

The paper bag is piping hot in his hands. He peels the top back and crunches on deep-fried dough crisp. Beside him, the girl recoils a little. “Oh. It’s a little heavy on the bean paste.”

“Is that the weird tangy feeling?”

“Yeah.” She shakes her head, folding her paper bag back up. “You can’t taste it, right?”

“Mmhmm. But I can still smell some things.”

“Cool.” She purses her lips, scanning the surrounding buildings. It’s a cute look on her. “Here. Come with me.”

(As if she needs to do anything but say the word.)

They cross back into the residential area, back to Dimitri’s building. Instead of going into the building, or better yet up to Dimitri’s room, she starts climbing the fire escape. She stops at the first landing, wreathed in moonlight. “Let’s go,” she says impatiently.

“Sorry,” Dimitri wheezes, “had to catch my breath.”

One storey at a time, they ascend, spiralling up and up and up. Dimitri lives on the eighth of ten floors; the girl flies all the way up to the roof. When he finally finds her again, out of breath, she’s sitting on someone’s shitty plastic lawn chair, nibbling her crepe. A water bottle rests in the crease between her thighs. He has no idea where she got it from.

“I like this part of Remire sometimes,” she says when he pulls up a chair and joins her. “They don’t let you to the top of a building like this downtown.”

“It’s a safety precaution, isn’t it? So that you don’t get blown down in the wind.”

“If they’d just learn to stop building into heaven. Then they’d stop getting struck down to earth.” She picks a piece of fried dough crisp out of her crepe and pops it in her mouth. “But I don’t like spending too much time here. Too many mosquitoes. And it’s too close to the factories.”

Dimitri grimaces. “Well, yes. The housing’s cheap here because of it.”

“Good to know if I’m ever in the market.”

A mercenary, living in a sturdy little 2LDK—maybe more, if she looks into the other buildings in the area. Maybe a safe house or a base of operation would suit her better. A lifetime ago, Dimitri would have panicked at a girl like her, would have dialed six emergency numbers before he even considered leaving his apartment to see her.

Now he just feels a weird kind of peace. Here he is, eating what honestly feels like paint chips next to an almost-stranger, and all he can bring himself to feel is calm at the way she picks the last bits of crepe and crisp out of her paper bag. Her lanyard dangles out of her lap, the bright blue of the USB on its end startling against the faux-brick red of the floor below. “You should wear that around your neck like a normal lanyard,” he says. “Maybe then it wouldn’t fall off.”

She raises an eyebrow. “But then I won’t have anyone to chase after me to return it,” she says, rolling out of her seat. The water bottle clatters to the ground and miraculously stays standing—score!—as she runs her thumb carefully across the divot of Dimitri’s chin, and then the edge of his bottom lip. There are stars in her eyes, always shifting and shifting. “And besides, I like a good chase.”

Then she pats his cheek kindly, and scoops up her water bottle, and climbs up the fence around the edge of the building, and without further ado leaps off, and Dimitri startles awake half-sprawled out over someone else’s lawn chair, and wonders what kind of cruel tricks his mind will play next.

* * *

Dimitri dreams of cyberspace. Glenn is not there. Neither are his parents. He is a physical human, and the girl with teal hair who barely comes up to his shoulder drags him through the crowd. The glow of a thousand storefronts reflects in her eyes.

Dimitri wakes up. The apartment is still, save for the whistle of the kettle that might from their kitchen or the neighbours’, as it is most mornings. The clock on the nightstand reads  _ 07:24, _ just the right time to be awake.

He gets up, gets dressed, gets washed. Pushes back the curtains and lets the sunlight stream in. Below, the street has already returned to its cheerful morning self, like it should be: kids running around, grandparents making their morning purchases, the familiar  _ doot-doot-doot _ of someone’s motorcycle passing through the area.

Dedue is washing tomatoes in the sink when Dimitri enters the kitchen. “Good morning,” he says, focused on the stream of water and the dirt that marrs the tomato skin. “Sleep well?”

“Mostly.” Dimitri frowns. “I think I dreamed of the girl again.”

“Your Cinderella.”

“Well, yeah.”

Dedue hums. “Are you going to do something about it, Prince Charming?”

Dimitri pauses where he’s pouring cereal for breakfast. That’s new. He couldn’t be Prince Charming if he tried.

The key being  _ if. _

“I’ll go after her, I guess,” he says. “Gotta give her glass slipper back.”

Dedue beams at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sitting in a discord vc watching my friend stream yakuza and man i am having all sorts of nostalgia of dotonbori and also of like street food in general. i miss going outdoors and doing things with my friends in person and also human contact  
> dagdan crepes are loosely inspired by tianjin crepes! this is because i am (drumroll please) from tianjin. the video linked is the closest i've found to the tianjin crepes we make at home. the crepes are made with a mung bean batter so they are very healthy! in tianjin they are a classic breakfast food  
> the squid skewer just looks really good so i put that in the story too. unfortunately being from tianjin i go feral for seafood but ESPECIALLY squid  
> claude's next place your bets


	3. clover club

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claude makes a cocktail from a Vocaloid song. Byleth assembles her avengers.

A customer who comes once a week is probably just passing by on the way home from work—Claude’s entertained plenty of those. Twice makes a regular. Three times and he starts to wonder which of the staff members they’ve tragically fallen in love with, only to be rebuffed because Hilda and Marianne eloped fresh out of high school and Claude is, well, Claude.

Not that he considers himself a member of staff. Despite all the years they go back, Hilda made it very clear that he had to earn his keep if she was going to harbour a wanted criminal, innocent or otherwise. He’s just a performer, an artist, the moneymaker. Some days he thinks she doesn’t even consider him a friend anymore.

“She does,” Marianne insists, and Claude tries to trust her word because she knows her wife better than anyone else on this miserable mortal coil. It’s hard to when he can hear Hilda bark at the phone in the other room. “She’s just frustrated, I think. We’re all worried for you, Claude.”

“Rest assured, I don’t intend to die anytime soon,” he jokes, and he means it. “My methods are guaranteed safe! No carcinogenic radiation, no ma’am.”

Marianne turns pink. “Oh, you know what I mean.” She frowns. “And you really have to stop using humour to deflect. You  _ know _ Hilda is going to fuss over you more.”

As usual, she’s right. Claude doesn’t know why he even bothered. He never gets  _ anything _ past Marianne, least of all his equipment. She read one article about how light projection technology had carcinogenic effects and now she’s convinced that she  _ has to _ look him over every single time he performs. It takes half a minute, which is half a minute she could be waiting tables or working the cash register, but one of the few things Marianne hates more than herself is social interaction with complete strangers.

The last piece of equipment in his kit is the hat. He insists he’s not a magician, but Hilda thinks it’s funnier if he summons light bunnies from a top hat, and forcibly ordered it for him off some half-verified seller in Fhirdiad. He only has to wear it until that trick, anyhow, and he owes Hilda his life and more.

He passes by the office room on his way into the common area. Hilda’s there now, still yelling at the phone. “We’ll just find another supplier,” she huffs, slamming the receiver down. Almost immediately, she deflates into her seat. “Motherfuckers,” she mutters, reaching for her rig, no doubt with the intention to find some new supplier for her stock.

She puts the headphones on and brushes her bangs out of the way to make way for the sensor. Almost immediately, the rig lights up as she slips into the Field, her body going limp as her consciousness gets dragged into the endless flood of cyberspace. She always checks her favourite jewelry stores first when she buzzes in, he remembers; whether she can remember to get the rest done afterwards is highly dependent on the urgency of the task and how spiteful she is about it.

Claude ducks into the common area before he can dreaming of cyberspace again.

* * *

The regular crowd knows when to part ways for Claude to get through. “Give it up,” Marianne announces from the counter, “for our magnificent in-house light artist, Claude!”

Some of the regulars start clapping, and the first timers join in confusedly. Claude makes a grand show of a sweeping bow. “Thank you, thank you,” he says. “What’s good tonight, my friends? Where are all of you from? Anyone from Derdriu?”

Marianne laughs lightly and raises her hand, or rather her elbow, since she’s busy washing glasses. A few others around the room raise their hands. “How about Enbarr?” A few more. “This one’s a long shot, but Brigid?” One young couple, squashed into an armchair in the corner. “Nice place, eh? How about Dagda?”

When Hilda and Marianne first opened  _ Twin Pearls _ half a year after they tied the knot, their idea was to cater to the folks living uptown—tired secretaries, CEOs, the kinds of people that they were taught to charm and service as girls. What they hadn’t realized was that most of those folk were already tied down to this bar or that pub. Remire wasn’t always home to so many rising industries, after all.  _ Twin Pearls _ became a home to travellers instead, those passing through Remire and wanting for a professional moment’s respite. Newcomers from all around, supplanted from home, unsure of when or even if they’ll return and what they’ll return to.

Claude’s not too different himself, in that respect.

“Good, good!” he chortles, taking the damned hat off his head and taking it for a spin on his finger. “Million dollar question. Anyone here from Fhirdiad?”

Once in a blue moon he gets to see a hand raised during this question, if he remembers to ask it at all. Fhirdiad’s a dreary kind of place, but it’s still an oasis of sorts amidst all the factories and smog. Not many people remember there’s a world outside its comforts, nor would they have need to.

So it’s always a surprise to see the girl at the counter raise her hand, swivelled around in her barstool with her lace-clad legs crossed before her. “Well, it seems like I’ve collected a full house!” he laughs, and the bar’s patrons laugh with him. “Oh, darn, but we’re missing so many people. So many seats still empty.” He shrugs. “Well, that’s a quick fix, isn’t it?”

He throws an arm out, and his projections fill the empty seats across the bar in the form of giant playing cards. The couple from Brigid find the seat across from them occupied by the queen of hearts; an ace of clubs joins Hilda behind the counter, and curtseys to the pretty girl sitting there. “That’s more like it,” he says, dusting off his hands dramatically. “Now, it’s, let me check my watch real quick, a quarter after ten on a Thursday. I’m sure most of you are too tired to do any dancing, aren’t you?” He throws a fist into the air, discreetly turning on the sound system with the other. “So let’s have our guests do the dancing!”

There are two things Claude likes about his light projection system; three, if he counts the multitude of discounts he got on it thanks to Hilda. The light projection only requires an overactive imagination and a bit of practice to maintain the projections, and he’s had plenty of both. The playing cards leap into the air to the rhythm of a vaudevillian dubstep, twisting and spiralling towards the stage as the audience oohs and ahhs and starts to clap along to the beat.

(But then again, Claude only has eyes for one person, the one person who watches motionless from the bar counter. He thinks she might be tapping her foot along to the beat, or it might just be his imagination. Would his light projection betray him now, in his hour of need?)

The hurricane of playing cards shrinks until the cards are of a normal size, and all at once they whirl like a cascade of wind into his outstretched hat. He plunks it squarely back on his own head as the music trails to a percussive end. “A venture through Wonderland, then,” he declares, letting sparks fly from his hands and in every direction. They fade just as quickly, seemingly shattering on the ground below. He only wishes he had a neuro-sound system to match, so that even those on the other side of the room could hear the stardust that splatters against plastic hardwood.

“Then venture, we shall!” An illusion of stairs brings him up a chair and onto a table, and then delicately, as so not to invoke Marianne’s ire, across the room. The first light glamour he’d worn of a magician’s tuxedo fades to be replaced with a sprightly Victorian suit done in gold and beige. His last step finds him on the ground once more, and he bows and extends a welcoming hand. “Miss Alice, would you grant me this adventure?”

The girl blinks owlishly at him, and takes his hand without another thought, allows him to pull her to her feet and spin her between the tables and the projected rosebushes. Claude imagines paintings and chess pieces and an endless garden of flowers, and they come to life in an instant, filling the bar as he pulls the girl onto the stage and deftly hits play on the sound system between heartbeats. The next song starts with a drum beat and a piano and a voice and a violin; he imagines those, too: a drumset with no player, a floating violin and microphone, a grand piano whose keys move up and down on their own.

By trade, Claude isn’t a performer. He’s supposed to be a desk jockey—hell, he was studying to be a statistical analyst, and light-play was only a hobby, an escape. He’d picked it up as a rebellious teenager, when his father was at his strictest about how long he could buzz in and he needed the kick of cyberspace without the experience itself. That’s the other thing he likes about the light projection system: it’s a pale mimicry of the Field, and a transient one at that, but it’s contained in itself. No one sees the boy projecting dragons alone in his bedroom, just as no one will catch Claude hiding from his grandfather in a minimalist bar in uptown Remire.

Sure, part of him remains wary that this girl, gorgeous as she is with dewy eyes and puffy pink lips, is going to drag him back clawing and screaming to his grandfather, but then she looks at him with her tiny hands in his, and he feels his inhibitions melt away. He conjures up illusions for her: prancing bunnies, dancing soldiers, and yes, dragons, his very best and most detailed ones. The rest of the bar delights in the spectacle, but Claude only has eyes for this girl who wears a letterman jacket and the ghost of a smile.

He ends his performance in explosions and fire, and receives a round of applause for his trouble. “Thank you, thank you,” he says, sketching a dramatic bow before turning to the girl. “And thank  _ you, _ Miss Alice, for entertaining our trip through Wonderland.”

“Thank you for having me,” she says, letting Claude lead her back to her seat at the bar. “It was a very beautiful display. I appreciated the flames at the end.”

“Did you, now.” He smiles as he slips through the door and winds himself up behind the bar. “Can I get you a drink? I’m not the expert mixologist that Hilda and Marianne fancy themselves to be, but…”

“Surprise me.” She rummages in her pockets and pulls out a piece of paper that Claude recognizes to be from the vending machine at the front of the bar;  _ HOUSE SPECIAL _ is printed across the slip in faded black toner. “Nothing too strong, though. I’d like to have my eyes open in an hour from now.”

“As the lady wishes.”

It’s fate, really, that he doesn’t actually know how to mix the house special. He’s not regular staff, after all—he’s just been learning a few recipes for shits and giggles. He finds her a glass first, one of the cocktail glasses with the fancy stems that Hilda keeps behind the bar. Somewhere in the recesses of his memory,  [ a robotic voice reminds him of the recipe;  _ and when you’re ready, let’s shake! _ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_9pF4NpN6o) Lemon juice, raspberry and grenadine, a good shot of gin, a shattered cube of ice. “One more thing,” he tells her, slapping a strainer on the counter, “and then we’re good to go.”

He’s amazed that they actually have eggs in the fridge. Then again, some of the regulars like their drinks weird. He makes a show of hitting the egg with the stirring spoon, juggling the yolk back and forth, and dumping it into a spare beer glass that he  _ hopes _ has been washed, before capping the shaker and going to town on it.

All the while, the girl watches him with curious eyes. Not even the raw egg white fazes her; not once does she blink as Claude strains the foamy concoction into the glass, garnishes it with a lemon slice and a sprig of basil. “You won’t get salmonella, don’t worry,” he tells her, smoothly placing the clover club in front of her—Marianne gets upset when he slides the drinks and inevitably tips them onto the bar or, worse yet, overshoots and shatters them into someone’s lap. “We only get pasteurized eggs.”

He watches as she brings the glass to her lips and takes a sip. When she holds the glass out to study in the dim light, there’s a thin film of egg froth across her cupid’s bow. Claude barely withholds himself from wiping it off, instead watching as her tongue darts out and deftly swipes the froth away.

“Well?”

She presses her lips together, as though adjusting her lipstick—though if she’s wearing any, it’s barely visible, and none of it lingers on the rim of the glass. “A little sour,” she admits, “but I like it like that. Not too sweet. The raspberry is a nice touch.”

And then, for good measure, she swirls the glass around with a practiced hand, and downs the sprig of basil. Claude studies her face carefully for any kind of change, any light of a smile, and wonders what kind of performance he’d have to put on to get that from her. “Even the garnish?” he asks jokingly, dumping the remaining ice into the sink. An automated arm by the faucet takes the shaker and strainer to be washed; a fresh set appear in their place. “How does  _ that _ taste?”

“Exotic,” she says in a perfect deadpan. “I’m getting notes of penne pesto between the lemon and the gin.”

“Spicy. I’ll let the owners know we’ve just invented a new drink for the menu. We can split the profits, fifty-fifty.”

He could joke like this forever, watching her for a reaction, but then the door opens, and two rather interesting individuals enter the bar, one after the other. The first is a girl with silver-white hair, tied up in a high tail with an elastic Claude very clearly recalls seeing in the beauty aisle at Anna’s. The other is a guy nearly tall enough to skim the doorframe, wearing a massive hoodie in the manner that one might a cloak in some bizarre LARP game. Both of them seat themselves down on opposite sides of the room, ignoring the menu and vending machine at the front, and very pointedly stare at the pretty girl at the counter, who is still quietly nursing the stupid clover club that Claude made her.

He doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out they’re looking for something in this girl, too.

“Sorry, sweetheart, work calls.” He sends her a cheeky wink, which she accepts with a lift of her lips. He grabs a towel off a cabinet knob and wipes the egg white off his hands. “Wait for me, would you?”

“Mmhmm.”

As soon as he leaves the bar, both of the two new patrons rise to their feet, rushing past him and making a beeline for the girl at the counter. It’s almost funny how quickly they seem to realize that they’ve got the same destination, and before the girl even turns around on her barstool they’re already clashing like titans. “‘Scuse me,” says the girl with the white hair, with a tone suggesting that she would rather be saying something much stronger, “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out of my way.”

“I could be saying the same,” says the tall guy. He rises to his full height, towering above the girl who glowers up at him and his eyepatch. Even in the dim light of the bar, Claude can see the scar peeking through underneath.

The pretty girl at the bar swivels around on her stool. “Edelgard, Dimitri,” she says, and both of them go rigid. “You came. Thank you.”

It takes all of two seconds for them to blow up at each other, and less than two seconds for Hilda to have an arm around each of their necks. “Don’t you fucking start,” she snaps. “There is a no fighting rule in  _ my _ bar, and if you can’t read the fucking rules I’m going to have to ask you to step out.” She glares at the girl at the bar. “You too. If you can’t control your dogs, get out with them.”

She lets go of the two—Edelgard and Dimitri, the girl had called them—and turns to Claude. “And you,” she says. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you two getting cozy since Monday. Whatever the fuck you have going on, you need to go resolve it.”

“Aw, Hilda—”

She turns her chin up, and Claude dutifully wipes his hands off and follows the other three out of the bar and into the hallway.

The air is stale with smoke and tension thick enough that Claude feels like he could choke on it. “So,” he says, or at least tries, “come often?”

“No, I don’t think I do,” Edelgard gripes. At the rate her eyebrows are furrowed, she’ll have wrinkles in her forehead within ten years. “Does anyone want to explain what is happening to me?”

“This isn’t a good place to talk,” says the girl, hands shoved in the pockets of her letterman jacket. “Claude. You have lived here for a while. Might I trouble you to direct us to a decent hotel?”

“Oh, uh. You’re going to have to define  _ decent _ for me, my friend. How many stars are we talking?”

Her gaze is piercingly cold when she turns to him. “For the matters we’re about to discuss? At least four.”

That is as effective a shut-up message as any other, and it shows: the other two look stricken, and Claude feels a shiver go down his back. “Cool,” he says, hitting the elevator down button. “As long as you’re paying.”

The elevator rises seventy-two floors at an astounding speed, and hums pleasantly when its doors open. Even though the elevator car could easily house two, the mirrors close in threateningly, imprinting the four people at the corners of the car in their crystalline reflection. “Grand Fódlan at Remire,” Claude commands, and the elevator chimes in response. The screen next to Dimitri flashes to life, showing its proposed path for their little party: down to floor thirty, across a bridge, through a building and then up another twenty floors. “Select path.”

Whirring from above, and then they’re all gripping onto the handrails for dear life as the elevator car goes hurtling down. Unsurprisingly, the still nameless girl is the only one not affected by the speed at which they’re going, still leaned against the mirror in complete nonchalance. Somewhere around floor fifty, she takes a pack of bubblegum from her pocket and unwraps one to pop in her mouth. By the time the elevator slows down to let them out at the thirtieth floor, she’s already popped three loud bubbles, and blows a fourth as they exit the elevator, disoriented and gasping.

Despite the battered looks on the other two, they don’t seem alarmed by the massive nature of the building. As they cross the bridge, no one runs to the windows on either side to stare out in wonder (or horror, for that matter). There’s a quiet understanding between the three of them that this particular breed of corporate tower is almost home, too familiar for comfort. Even their supposed benefactor, who has styled herself some kind of de-facto leader and walks at the head of their group, is unfazed by the glass and steel.

The elevator in the next building is a tad larger, but sacrifices its space for opulent scrollwork in white and gold, as well as a corner table and potted plant in each corner, firmly affixed with several screws. Maybe it was designed for awkward, antisocial fools like them to make small talk. 

They do not, in fact, make small talk. The elevator hurtles skyward, and releases them with a muted  _ ding! _ once they reach the fiftieth floor.

The girl ditches them in the lobby as she hits up the the reception desk, leaving them to stand awkwardly. Not two feet away there is a fountain ringed with plush seats. “I have been on my feet all day,” Claude says, “so I’m going to sit. Feel free to join me.”

He does so promptly. Dimitri, the poor guy, gingerly sits down on a chair a small distance away; Claude hears his knees crack. Edelgard crosses her ankles as she sits four cushions away from Claude. “I have to admit, this has been the most confusing night of my life,” she says. “I would like things to start making sense now.”

“Yeah, that would be nice.” Claude extends a hand in her direction. “Well, I suppose introductions are in order. I’m Claude. Part time bartender, full time light performer. Nice to meet you.”

She does not shake. He offers the hand the other way; Dimitri does not shake it either. “Dimitri,” he says simply.

“Edelgard.”

They all throw stares at each other for a long second. “Well, it seems none of us are ready to divulge anything past that,” Claude sighs, leaning forward. “I dunno about you guys, this whole situation seems… off, at best. Shit, Hilda’s gonna be  _ so _ mad at me.”

“I asked for two days off,” Edelgard mumbles. “Probably should have asked for more. There is no way I’m not going to get fired.”

“Just bribe your coworkers or something.”

“He won’t be able to do anything about it, he can’t buzz either.”

Before Claude can process the ramifications of that sentence, the girl returns with a deck of hotel key cards. “Let’s go,” she says, and the three of them jump to their feet in record time and follow after her like lost ducklings. “I am bloody exhausted of elevators.”

They take one anyway. She smacks a key card against the sensor, and it opens to let them in. A sign on the inside very clearly instructs them to hold on, which she very blatantly ignores. The doors close, and then the elevator goes up, and then  _ sideways, _ and a bit further up, and sideways and in a circle, and when the contents of Claude’s stomach have been thoroughly churned like butter the girl is dragging them out and into what seems like a hallway.

It isn’t. A few steps down, Claude gawks at the wall-to-wall screen that must be a TV; the doors on either side of the hallway turn out to lead to  _ bedrooms, _ and the massive room they enter is home to a huge sprawling couch, a glass chandelier and a  _ fully-automated kitchen and bar. _

“What in the nine hells,” Dimitri whispers, which sums up Claude’s thoughts pretty accurately, too.

Their benefactor turns, hand on hip. “We’ll be staying here overnight,” she says nonchalantly. “Dibs on the master bedroom.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Edelgard says, panic rising in her tone, “you said you’d explain things. Who are you, and why are you doing this?”

The  _ and why me _ remains painfully unspoken.

The girl blinks. “You can call me Byleth,” she says, moving to the giant screen wall. With practiced ease, she flips up one of the panels and uncaps the USB on her lanyard to plug in. All the lights in the room flicker momentarily, spatter out, and then turn themselves back on in a blinding wave. “Alright. We’re secure now.”

Byleth recaps her USB smoothly, and it returns to its place at her hip. All three of them follow the motion. “As for the reason I brought you all here…”

For the first time, something akin to fear flickers in her eyes. “Five years ago, my father was murdered,” she says, “and I have reason to believe that his killers are the reason none of you can buzz in anymore.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate hotel elevators! when i was eight i went to montreal and the elevator went down so fast it made me nauseous. dear elevator engineers PLEASE consider that some of us have motion sensitivities when you invent this shit  
> when i was in japan a few restaurants had a system where you'd pay upfront by buying an order slip from a vending machine and handing it to the chef. it saved a lot of space and a lot of time and i just thought it was really neat  
> in case you skipped the song link, it's Clover♣Club by Yuuyu-P featuring Hatsune Miku. the lyrics aren't completely accurate to the recipe - the IBA official recipe cites raspberry syrup instead, and i've seen versions where you can use muddled raspberries instead. either way the song is really nostalgic for me haha


	4. receding skyline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Would you trust a stranger to lead you to the ends of the world? Would you trust her if she told you to jump?

“Up until five years ago, my father and I worked as mercenaries,” Byleth explains, sprawled across the couch—or, rather, a segment of it, since it seems to coil endlessly like some infernal snake of cushions. “You may have heard of him as the Blade Breaker.”

“Mercenaries,” Edelgard says, hugging a large cushion to her chest, “digital or physical?”

“Physical, mostly.” Byleth taps her temple twice; her sleeve burgeons out with the movement to reveal sweater paws, _how cute._ “I can’t buzz, but my father could. We did mostly deliveries of sensitive data, escorting high-profile clients, the occasional interrogation.” Her hand drops limply to the couch once more. “Five years ago—a bit more, actually—we were returning from a mission, and a masked woman stabbed him in the elevator when we were heading up to our hotel rooms.” 

She purses her lips. “We caught her, of course, but she had some kind of incineration technology on her. Burned to nothing in an instant, left no clues behind. Dad didn’t even make it to the hospital because the knife was laced with a lethal dose of fentanyl.”

“Ouch,” Claude murmurs. “My condolences.”

“I’ve had my time to grieve. Now, I have to do something about it.” Byleth looks at each of them in turn with cold, cold eyes. “Between the four of us, none of us can buzz in. However, unlike me, that was an acquired trait that the three of you came into over the past few years—namely about four or five years ago. You—” she points at Dimitri. “You contracted data ghosts as a result of trauma, four years ago.”

“That I did,” he says, flustered.

“You were forced to abandon your physical identity and hide from cyberspace after you were framed for murder, around the time my dad was killed,” she continues, turning to Claude. He nods grimly, and she turns to Edelgard. “And _you_ didn’t just get sick—someone purposely inoculated you with a virus that took away your ability to buzz.”

It’s about as close to the truth as she can get without straight up spilling the beans of Edelgard’s identity. “Three for three,” she says. “You know too much, my friend.”

Byleth shrugs. “Knowledge is power, data is money,” she says nonchalantly, as though she’s not basically blackmailing them into silence. “Over the past five years, I’ve been… investigating, after a fashion, and I’ve come to conclude that the same organization has had a hand in each of these events. They call themselves, er.” She takes a deep breath. “God, this name is stupid. They call themselves _those who slither in the dark,_ which I couldn’t even have written in my teenage emo years.”

The boys laugh, and Edelgard forces herself to join them. It does sound like a stupid name, though the thought of Byleth undergoing a “teenage emo” phase is more ridiculous than any of the words in that phrase. “They are primarily based in the Field, so you see why I couldn’t do this alone,” Byleth continues. “I’m in touch with someone who claims to have more information on their organization, and wants to take them down. So far, the most startling claim is that this group—let’s call them the Slithers, shall we—want to lock _everyone_ out of the Field.”

Silence settles over the room. “Yeah,” Byleth drawls. “Everyone.”

“But even now, at _most_ a quarter of the population can buzz in,” Edelgard exclaims, “and that number has been rapidly going down! What kind of—wh— _why?”_

“They want dominion,” Byleth says, turning to her. “Reclamation, I suppose, of a legacy.” Her gaze is piercingly cold. “Did you think your illness was an isolated incident? They’ve been practicing for years with crests.” She crosses her arms. “I’m sure you’re well aware of how crests work.”

And really, how wouldn’t Edelgard know? How many times was she told as a child to take care of herself, make sure no one got a hold of her blood or her hair or any of her cells in case they used it to undo all of her father’s work? How many precautions did she take, only for them all to fail in the end?

“But crests augment the ability to buzz in,” Dimitri says, brow furrowed. “The way we identify crest operons in the genetic sequence is that they are preceded by the sequence for galeadase, which produces polygaleatose necessary for connection to the Field—unless—”

Byleth nods. “The Slithers, somehow,” she says, “figured out that you can change galeadase in such a way that it _degrades_ polygaleatose instead. I’m no biologist, but from what I can tell, it happens when two separate galeadases from two crest operons meet and fuse irreversibly.” She grimaces. “I know someone who had two separate crests introduced to her body as virions. She was one of the most accomplished cyber jockeys I knew. Guess what happened to her.”

A career cut brutally short. A life cut brutally short, perhaps. Edelgard has seen it happen all too much herself—has seen it happen _to_ herself.

“Right now, the primary weapon they’re developing is known as the Nemesis virus,” Byleth continues. “Produces some thing or other that inhibits polygaleatose. I honestly don’t know how many victims there are, or how many people they’ve released this thing onto. Never learned how to read a genetic sequence. I just know we need to stop them, okay?” She folds her arms over her chest. “For my dad, and for everyone who’s been affected by this.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Claude says, leaning back in his seat. “You have a decent lead, you have the resources and the research. Hell, you seem like a nice enough person. Why not do all of this yourself? Why us in particular?”

“You yourself have pointed out that none of us can buzz,” Edelgard adds. “That’s not exactly information to be flinging around carelessly.”

Something flashes dangerously in her eyes, teal turned to steel for all of a second. “Frankly, I don’t care if you guys stay or not,” she says. “You could go and forget everything that happened here tonight. I’d get you home myself. I’m asking this because the three of you are the most brilliant cyber jockeys of the era, and you have the exact skillset to get this done.” She gestures at each of them in turn. “Statistical analyst. Pharmacist. Data runner.” She jabs a thumb at herself. “Mercenary, to make sure all of you get home in one piece.”

She exhales sharply as she sits up. “I have contacts in a lot of industries,” she says. “Meds, cyberspace rigs—hell, one of my childhood friends is on the board of directors of Anna’s. Please, trust me when I say this: I can get you your ability to buzz back.”

In the silence that follows, she stands up, stretches out in feline fashion, and heads to the kitchen. “Room service is covered,” she says, waving a card that must be the menu, “so order whatever you want. We check out tomorrow at noon. Make your decision by then.” To the panel on what is presumably the oven, she clears her throat and says, “the charcuterie board, please.”

The not-oven hums a happy tune. _WOULD YOU LIKE A DRINK TO GO WITH THAT,_ says the panel.

Byleth is silent for a second. “A carton of chocolate milk, please.”

A few second later, the not-oven, which Edelgard mentally adjusts to _the magic food box,_ hums again, and Byleth opens it up and retrieves her charcuterie board and her carton of chocolate milk. “Good night,” she says. “Knock if there’s trouble.”

The master bedroom door clicks shut behind her, and clicks again as it locks, leaving the three of them to wither in the relative calm. 

A few of the lights go out—probably motion sensors getting tired of them sitting in human lumps on the snake of a couch. “Shit, was that prosciutto?” Claude mumbles. “And grapes too.”

“She said we can order room service,” Dimitri says, rising from his part of the couch. Edelgard still hates how unnecessarily tall he is, like he’s got to stare at the part in everyone’s hair to survive or something. “Take the menu. Claude, you said you wanted the charcuterie board?”

Edelgard takes the damn card and flips it over a few times. It’s one of those fancy lenticular prints, showing the breakfast menu and lunch on one side, then dinner, drinks and snacks on the other. _Pinot Noir, ‘75. Riesling, ‘76. Lima & co. prestige cuvée, ‘70. Chocolate milk, 10 fl oz. _ She can barely read anything with the print shifting every other second, and hands it to Claude in defeat. “Charcuterie sounds good. Can we get champagne too?”

“Jeez, we don’t even carry some of this stuff up at Twin Pearls.” Claude whistles. “Ooh, Grado twelve-year, that’s worth a pretty penny. We could order, like, all of these, and I could just run them back to the bar.”

“Byleth still has all the key cards,” Dimitri points out. “You’d be locked out.”

The realization falls too quickly after that. Byleth, it seems, is a cruel lover, crueller still by the fact that she brought the three of them here to beg at the foot of her throne. No wonder she told them to make their decision by noon. She’s given them a choice, an ultimatum. If they leave, it’s forever.

The same starry-eyed wonder that brought Edelgard here—told Carmina she was going to chase a ghost, got her request for two precious days of vacation time painstakingly approved—must be the same reason that Dimitri and Claude are here, too. Did Byleth enchant them the same way she enchanted Edelgard, with deft fingers and clever tongue and shining eyes? Has she—did she—

“Well, if I’m leaving it’s not going to be on an empty stomach,” Claude says, shattering the spiral before Edelgard can slip down its depths. “Champagne, you said? Expensive taste.”

“I just like the bubbles,” she manages.

Claude rattles things off the menu for the three of them to decide on: figs and ham on flatbread, queen loach meunière, baked camembert, and yes, the giant charcuterie platter that Byleth carried off into the master bedroom like a knight carrying a lady off into the sunset. They order one of those for starters, and a bottle of the Valentian champagne for Edelgard, and then a macaroni and cheese for Dimitri. “Seriously, dude, there’s six cheeses in this thing, are you _sure_ you want to order it?”

“You were the one who said we shouldn’t leave on an empty stomach,” Dimitri points out, finger hovering over the order panel.

“Fair enough.”

The champagne and the charcuterie platter arrive first; Edelgard snags a handful of pistachios and muscat grapes before getting up to pop the champagne bottle and pour them each a glass. The magic food box sings a happy song, and Dimitri opens it and lifts out a crock of gratin with two dishcloths. They pull up a coffee table and set all the food out like it’s some kind of midnight picnic. Edelgard finds plates and forks in one of the kitchen drawers, and they all sit on the floor leaning against the couch and eat like kings.

“So,” says Claude, mostly focused on pulling the cheese of his macaroni into an everlasting thread, “everyone’s favourite mercenary. What are we going to do about her?”

Dimitri gingerly hefts a slice of calabrese into his plate to lay delicately over the mountain of cheese he’s built. “She knows too much about me for comfort.”

“It is hard to reconcile my previous impression of her with, well.” Edelgard gestures at the locked door with her fork, and Dimitri grunts in understanding. “I trust that her intentions are good, and I don’t think she’s the kind to throw us to the wolves.” She pauses. “But it’s going to come at a cost, you know? I have two part-time jobs and I work twelve-hour days. If someone offered to give me the key to the Field again, no strings attached, I’d grovel at their feet. But now… there are almost certainly strings attached here.”

“Yeah. Can’t say I’m glad about leaving Hilda and Marianne behind,” Claude admits. “I know I’m only technically _temporary_ staff, but they’re tired enough with me helping, and I have an inkling Hilda’s inheritance is running out.”

“I told my roommate I’d be back in three days,” Dimitri says quietly, head down. At this angle, Edelgard can see where the strings of his eyepatch have been knotted tightly beneath his hair. “He’s fine on his own, but…”

“Carmina,” Edelgard says. The other two look at her. “My sister. She… contracted the same virus that I did, so to speak. She’s not doing quite as well as I am.”

So there are strings attached. There’s always strings attached: Carmina waiting alone in their matchbox, the promise of paradise in the Field, Byleth Byleth _Byleth_ eating million-gold cheese and prosciutto with hundred-gold chocolate milk in the other room, no doubt every bit as nervous as they are here. “No matter what we do, we win some, we lose some,” Claude says, which Edelgard thinks is a pretty apt summary.

“For argument’s sake, let’s just assume for a second everything Byleth has told us is the truth,” Dimitri says, and boy, wouldn’t Edelgard like to believe that. “What do we stand to lose from taking up her offer? We go back to the Field, she avenges her dad. How much danger do we put ourselves in when we choose that? And can our loved ones take our absence for as long as we need?”

“But on the other hand, how many people will suffer at the hands of the virus, if she’s telling the truth about that?” Edelgard counters. “Even if only a quarter of the population can buzz to begin with, if the Nemesis virus affects everyone the way it’s affected Carmina and I, people are going to suffer.” She stares at her distorted image in the crystal of her champagne glass; the girl in the reflection stares back. “I can’t leave Carmina alone, but I can’t let everyone end up like we have, either.”

Follow your heart or follow your mind; neither sees a complete ending. It’s like she’s got to pick a cliff to dive down, and either be met with hungry sharks or jagged rocks. She wishes she had grappling gear.

Claude, on the other hand, is playing charcuterie Jenga with impressive dexterity: a slice of toasted baguette, a rolled up sheet of prosciutto, then Gautier cheese, more baguette, more prosciutto, more cheese, more baguette. “I have an idea,” he says, in the tone that one might say _I’m about to commit arson._ This does not fill Edelgard with joy. “It’s a little underhanded, but, I mean, Byleth’s gone pretty low with setting us all up like this, to be honest.”

“I’m all ears,” Edelgard says, just as Dimitri blurts out “the cheese is falling out.”

“Aw, thanks, big guy.” Claude readjusts his sandwich, dragging each movement out painfully slow. “Here’s my idea. Byleth said she had contacts everywhere, right? Okay, maybe friends in the rig development industry won’t help us here, but she knows people.” He stares pointedly at Edelgard. “People who can get your sister the medical care she needs.”

“Cut to the chase.”

“What I’m saying is that we can issue Byleth an ultimatum,” he says. “She wants us on her side. Hell, I’d say she’s desperate for us to work with her. It’s like she said: _knowledge is power, data is money._ She knows us, but we know her, too, and we know she’s tracking down the Slithers. If word gets to _them_ that she’s on their trail, she’s done for.” His grin isn’t exactly of the nice variety. “So let’s leverage that. Mercenaries have prices. If she’s hiring us, we can play her game, too.”

“Claude,” Dimitri says, “what the _hell_ did you do for a living before you got locked out of the Field?”

“Market analyst, didn’t you hear her call us out?” he says cheekily. “Judging by how much you understood the whole crest operon thing, I’m guessing you were the pharmacist, and you…”

“Data runner,” Edelgard confirms. There’s a bitter note on her tongue as she says it; it wasn’t like she ran data many times before it all came crashing down. “You have a point, Claude, but isn’t this asking too much of her? It can’t be easy to get all three of us back up in the Field.”

“That’s… fair, actually.” He purses his lips. “If my inkling is correct, taking down the Slithers would solve my problem, since I _can_ still buzz. It’s a bit harder for you two since you’ve got medical concerns, don’t you? Dimitri, back when you were a pharmacist, were there any meds being made for polygaleatose deficiency or data ghosts?”

Dimitri remains silent. “There were,” he says, “a few drugs being developed before I… left the industry. I never saw those projects reach fruition, though.”

“Okay, so Byleth’s gotta pull some _real_ strings if she’s going to solve that problem for you guys,” Claude concludes. “Unless she’s absolutely certain about being able to get you guys buzzing again, you’ve got yourself a talking point. Get someone to check in on your roommate, and Edelgard, you can get her to send doctors for your sister. She’s on someone else’s payroll, anyways.”

The more he says it, the more Edelgard thinks he’s damn right about it. If Byleth really has the resources she says she has, surely she can get a doctor to check in on Carmina, watch over her for a few weeks? It’d be easier for the other two, no doubt—a temporary worker at Twin Pearls, someone to check on Dimitri’s roommate every now and then. “It’s not a bad plan,” she concedes. “Well done.”

Claude grins at her (nicely, this time) before taking a truly abysmal bite of his baguette Jenga tower. “Are you not afraid for your teeth,” Dimitri says in a pinched voice.

_“Mmmmrph.”_

“Alright, so we’ve got terms,” Edelgard says. Years ago, she’d be drawing up a contract. Now, she doesn’t know what to think. Maybe it’s the champagne talking. “What happens if Byleth can’t provide? Do we just put more pressure on her?”

“Well, yeah.” Claude shrugs. “Someone’s got to give, and it’s not going to be me.”

“That works.” She lifts her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

“Aye,” Dimitri mumbles, raising his barely-touched champagne. Claude follows suit. “To whatever the hell this is.”

“To whatever the hell this is,” they echo, and clink their glasses together, not knowing what the future holds.

* * *

Edelgard wakes up drowning in pillows. The sheets drag her under and she flounders, flounders in the soft mass for some kind of purchase, but the soft cotton slips from her grasp along with any residual traces of her dreams.

Her hand docks painfully on the nightstand, and she hauls herself up gasping for breath. Something beeps softly; she looks up at the giant flatscreen TV holstered against the wall telling her _it’s 9:30, time to wake up,_ and decides that okay, maybe last night was not in fact a fever dream after all.

Even though she knew fully well she wouldn’t be waking up with Byleth at her side, somehow she’s still disappointed. The covers are warm, almost stiflingly so, and yet the room is still so cold without another body to warm it. She wrestles herself out from the sea of pillows (why didn’t she think to just dump them on the floor?) and sits up.

The damn bedroom is literally twice the size of her and Carmina’s entire apartment. There are amenities of every imaginable kind: a bathroom with a bathtub the size of the bed, curtains that open automatically when she gives the command, lotions and shampoos and conditions that leave her skin shimmering. It’s such a departure from the shitty motel that Byleth had taken her to the night they first met, and she can’t help but wonder if this is a performance for one of the others.

Then again, there just aren’t hotels like this downtown. She ties off the cotton bathrobe around her waist and steps into snowy white slippers as she approaches the window. All of it’s fake, really—a giant LED screen simulating sunlight, since god knows you can’t get any with all the towers in the way. “Show me outside,” she tells the screen.

The light flickers, cuts, and zooms in on the city. Edelgard looks down fifty storeys into a void she calls home. She counts as far down as the thirty-second floor, and can count no further. Her and Carmina’s apartment is on the sixteenth—too far down to see, and two blocks west for that matter. All along, Twin Pearls was just one building and an elevator ride away, and she’d never realized.

Her phone rumbles on the nightstand, clattering violently on the wood. She strides over to pick it up. It’s a call from Carmina—unusual, since her sister prefers to text. She must have gotten tired of being ignored.

“Mina?”

 _“El, pick up your phone for once, dummy,”_ comes the exasperated voice on the other side. _“How’d your night in paradise go?”_

Edelgard makes a face, knowing fully well her sister can’t see it. “Uh, not paradise, that’s for sure.” She sits on the edge of the bed. “Look, Mina, I have something to tell you, and I really hope you won’t be mad at me.”

Static for a second. _“Well, that doesn’t sound fun and sexy. What’s on your mind?”_

“Byleth—she—her name is Byleth, probably should have mentioned that. She has a job for me and these two guys, and I don’t know if it’s safe to talk about what the job is, but…” She gulps. “Mina, the people who did this to us, they’re trying to do it to _everyone._ Byleth is trying to stop them, and she wants me to help, and she said she can make me buzz again. And I know that’s an unfairly good deal for me and for no one else, so I’m going to go haggle with her if she’s awake. I’m going to get you the surgery you need, and I’m going to quit both the pachinko parlour and Anna’s, and I’m going to get a better job and make sure we _live.”_ She inhales sharply; her lungs feel like they’re buckling under the strain. “But only if you want me to.”

There’s silence on the other side. “Mina? Mina, please, talk to me.”

 _“You’ve already made up your mind, El, why are you asking me?”_ On the other side, Carmina sighs. _“I just wish I wasn’t your bargaining chip.”_

She’s right. Edelgard feels her heart sink with every word. “I’m sorry,” she whispers.

 _“Don’t be. Our lives were fucked up before you fell for a customer and went uptown to find her.”_ Trying to lighten the mood with humour, as always. _“Like, yeah surgery would be great and all that, and if you could buzz again and get a decent job we’d definitely get the hell out of downtown and I could work too, maybe. I just don’t want me to be the lynchpin of all of this. Clearly you’re already hellbent on going with this Byleth girl, but don’t put me as the condition on that.”_

“Mina—”

_“That’s my final word on it.”_

Edelgard can _see_ her turning her nose up on the last word. “Cool,” she chokes out. “I’ll let you know how negotiations at breakfast go, I guess.”

_“Good luck. Oh, and don’t forget to put in your leave at work.”_

“Gotcha.” She pauses. “Stay safe. Love you.”

_“Love you too, El.”_

Carmina hangs up first, and Edelgard is left to stare at her phone in deafening silence. Every word her sister spoke echoes in her mind; Carmina was never happy about her illness, never happy to be the helpless invalid or the damsel in distress. Even without a crest she was five times the cyber jockey Edelgard ever was, and she’s rightfully upset about being treated as a liability.

Still. Without Edelgard’s wages from work, Carmina’s not going to last. Even if victory lies ahead, she still has to make sure her sister is fed while she fights the good fight. She digs a fresh set of clothes out of her bag—thank god she’d had the sense to bring extras—and gets ready to change.

And then she throws a look at the bathroom again, and thinks again.

There’s no time to soak, but the shower is gloriously warm, and moreover it runs _immediately_ warm. For a minute or two, Edelgard stands under the spray, basking in the torrent as it drums on her sore muscles. The shower gel goes smoothly over her skin, and when she rinses it off it feels like she’s throwing off a pair of shackles.

She steps out of the shower with steam curling off her body in wisps, and snags the largest, fluffiest towel she finds on the rack to wrap around herself. It’s almost like she’s a child again—sitting on the bathroom counter, blow-drying her hair, kicking her heels and banging them against the cabinet doors. She’s probably causing a terrible ruckus, but in the fog of the bathroom she could not care less: she helps herself liberally to the facial products, and laughs over the tiny single-serve toothpaste tubes in a blown-glass bowl.

It’s so tastefully wasteful. Even as a child, Edelgard never stayed somewhere so gilded.

While she could live in the hotel-provided pajamas forever, they’re monogrammed with the hotel logo, and Edelgard’s had enough of logoed shirts for one lifetime. As she dons her crop top and cardigan combo (“date night outfit”, she’d called it), her phone buzzes with a text notification. She pulls it up.

> _(09:46) f: Seeing as I did not find a bottle in the recycling, I can only assume your magic date went well?_
> 
> _(09:46) e: stop looking through the recycling you creep?_
> 
> _(09:46) f: Hey, it’s written in my protocol to take out the trash in the staff room!_
> 
> _(09:47) f: Do you think I’d dig around the bin of my own volition?_
> 
> _(09:47) e: fair enough_
> 
> _(09:47) e: it’s going… interestingly, to say the least_
> 
> _(09:47) e: um. this might be a lot to ask_
> 
> _(09:48) e: i might be going away for a while, like a few weeks? maybe a month?_
> 
> _(09:48) e: could i trouble you to check in on my sister once in a while i’m gone_

She grits her teeth. Claude was right when he spoke about making terms last night. She’s got to make a deal, too, and there is one person she knows who is about as sad about their love life as her unfortunate coworker is.

Well. Soon to be ex-coworker, if things turn out okay.

> _(09:49) e: i’ll set you up with a guy i know_
> 
> _(09:49) f: :O_
> 
> _(09:49) f: Consider it done!_
> 
> _(09:50) e: neat, i’ll forward you her phone number if i have to go_
> 
> _(09:50) e: don’t call her she hates calls_

Dimitri is already having breakfast when she leaves her room. “Good morning,” he says, sitting neatly on a chair that seems relatively too small for him. He’s poking at a continental breakfast, and eyeing a granola-yogurt cup with much consideration. “The others aren’t up yet.”

There’s a click as a door opens. “What do you mean, others?” Claude says, emerging from his room with his arms stretched overhead. He’s still wearing the same set of clothes from yesterday, unlike her and Dimitri; he didn’t have time to grab anything before they were shooed out of the bar, after all. “Good morning to you too. I hope you two slept well, because I just about suffocated.”

“Mood,” Edelgard mumbles, picking up the menu card once more. It’s hard to discern the words. “Uhhh, a breakfast panini, please, with bergamot tea for one.”

The magic food box serves up her panini, toasted to a golden crisp and oozing with mozzarella, within a minute. It comes in a clean white tray with a sleek tea setting on one side: a small dish of sugar, the tiniest milk jug she’s ever seen in her life, a mug of steaming bergamot tea slowly steeping darker and darker. She lifts it out of the chute and shrugs past Claude as he slides up to make his order. “Two eggs, sunny side up, and a toasted bagel please," he says as she slides into her seat across from Dimitri.

It's funny, really, how their walk of shame ends up being a 9:30 breakfast in a five star hotel uptown, saying _please_ and _thank you_ to an automated box. Byleth probably isn’t even awake yet, though there’s a low rumble from her room that might be music or a loose phone vibration or speaking. Edelgard pours milk into her tea and watches it pool up in clouds. “Did you guys call home?” she asks, picking up a wedge of her panini. It’s barely held together by a toothpick, which she plucks out. Resigned to her fate, she takes to eating each component individually with a fork.

“I let Dedue know of the circumstances,” Dimitri mumbles. “He was very enthusiastic about me going. Said something about it being good for me to get out of the house and explore the world.” His tone seems to suggest this is a direct quote from his call. “But… I guess I’m still worried for him.”

Claude nods, poking an egg yolk on his plate. Edelgard watches in fascination as ichor oozes down into the stone-grey plate, pooling at the edges. “I used the hotel phone to call Hilda. She was… less upset than I thought? But also more upset than I thought.” He rips a piece off his bagel to mop up the yolk and pops it all in his mouth. “Like, she didn’t get mad at me for running off with a stranger or anything, which I suppose she can’t because she basically did that with Marianne straight out of high school, and she’s not upset that they’re going to be down a worker.” For once, remorse clouds his eyes as he drops his gaze. “She’s just worried that I’ll be in danger. Which is definitely a legitimate concern, I’m also worried I’ll be in danger.”

“Oh, danger will be aplenty, but I think you guys will have control over it.”

All three of them turn in horror as Byleth steps out of the master bedroom, still decked in soft monogrammed pajamas with the top half-unbuttoned. “Good morning,” she offers, blatantly ignoring the way they’re all staring at her. “A caramel cappuccino please, and bacon.”

The magic food box takes a visible moment to process this order. _HOW MUCH BACON,_ asks the screen in concern.

“Like, a plate of it.”

Silence. Then a hum, and she opens the box to retrieve her coffee setting and, true to her order, a plate of nothing but crispy bacon. “So,” she says, sliding into the chair next to Edelgard, “I said I’d give you guys until noon, but it sounds like you did some, uh, discussing last night.”

“We did,” Claude says, putting his fork down. “You brought up some pretty dire points last night, and I think I speak for all three of us when I say we don’t want that to come to fruition. But you’ve also pulled some… pretty backhanded tricks to get us to come here, my friend.”

Byleth doesn’t respond, but she does turn the slightest bit pink and nod.

“None of us live alone. If we do this with you, we’re leaving our families and loved ones behind. If we don’t return from this, it’ll doom them.” He leans across the table. “So prove that we can trust you. That you aren’t just leading us to our deaths. Give us homes to return to, and families to get back to.”

Something in Byleth visibly changes. It’s like she’s deflated, like a tension in all her joints has suddenly left her. “Okay,” she says. “That’s a very reasonable condition to set. You guys don’t exist in vacuums, I forgot about that. Tell me what you need, and I’ll see what I can get you.”

Edelgard blinks. The guys blink. _That easy?_ “Well, it’d be nice to get someone to fill my shoes at Twin Pearls,” Claude stammers, caught off guard. “And maybe some financial support, too.”

“Done. Dimitri?”

“Someone to check in on Dedue,” he says without hesitation. “Someone who can help him with the garden. We’re doing okay financially, but I don’t want him to be alone, he’ll work himself to the bone.”

“I have some friends who live in the area, I can ask them to check in.” She turns to Edelgard. “And you?”

Edelgard purses her lips. “My sister needs open heart surgery,” she says, ignoring the way her heart twists and turns, “of a specific kind. Due to complications from our... illness. Aside from that, I can’t really take extended leaves from either of my jobs without losing them. I’d like some promise of financial security should that fall through.”

“I can pull some strings to keep you on the roster at work,” Byleth says. “As for your sister…” She licks the bacon grease from her lips. “My friend who had the crests introduced to her body as virions, she’s doing med school right now. If anyone knows what to do about your sister’s complications, it’ll be her. I’ll cash in a favour with her and see what we can get done.”

And then just like that, she returns to her bacon, and steals Edelgard’s sugar bowl to dump unceremoniously in her coffee while she's at it. “So you’re just going to do all that,” Dimitri says incredulously, “at the drop of a hat, no questions asked.”

Byleth shrugs. “I’m asking a lot of you three. It’s only fair that you ask something of me in return.” She tries to get the last piece of bacon on her fork, and it crunches under the pressure and shatters into a million fragments. “None of you are qualified to do all the things we’re trying to accomplish—just a part. Putting you at risk from the other things means I should at least _try_ to compensate you for helping. Honestly, if there’s _anything_ you need while we’re out there, just let me know and I’ll do my best to get it for you.”

“When you put it like that, it makes it sound like you’re some kind of sugar mommy,” Claude snarks. Byleth smacks him over the head with her fork. “Okay, okay, cease and desist. I take that back, you’re like some cool pirate keeping a bunch of mermaids as pets.”

“Mermaids,” says Edelgard flatly.

“Y’know, because we can’t go onto the Field—” He ducks as Edelgard throws her teaspoon at him. It clatters off the table and onto the ground. “I’m sorry! Bad puns not allowed, got it!”

“Time them better,” Byleth scolds. She drains the last of her coffee and gets up to put all her tableware back into the magic food chute. It vanishes almost immediately with a deep whirring noise. “Anything you guys want right off the bat? The rest of today and tomorrow are clear, since my contact for your meds isn’t going to be available until Thursday.”

They all stare at her, frozen over their breakfast. Edelgard briefly misses her teaspoon. “Can we get some more comfortable clothes?” Claude says sheepishly. “I don’t think wearing my performance gear is going to be very conducive to buzzing comfortably.”

“Very well. Pack it up, we’re heading out at… ten, I guess,” Byleth says. “Make sure you don’t leave anything behind. We’ve got a train to catch.”

“A train?”

“Yeah, a train.” For the first time, the beginnings of a smile grace her lips. “To Enbarr.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so sorry to everyone who looked at that sciencey bit and thought "what the fuck", because i wrote that a few days ago and now i read it and i too am like "what the fuck". the idea is that the sugar (polygaleatose) acts as a beacon for the waves that hook your mind up to cyberspace. tldr if you have two crests they cancel each other out and eat all the polygalatose in your body, and that kills your ability to buzz. i wonder what that means for Edelgard  
> (side note, _galea_ means helmet! this probably makes a lot more sense if you know the etymology of _cybernetics_ huhuhu)  
> and hey, Carmina reveal! i created a cast of siblings for Edelgard a while back with the intention of inflicting as much pain as possible onto them, and Carmina ended up being the closest to Edelgard in both age and friendship. they're not full siblings - Carmina's mother is supposed to be one of Ionius's other consorts - but Anselma leaving when Edelgard was young meant the two had plenty of time to bond.  
> what's going to happen in enbarr? place your bets


	5. 10:00 to enbarr

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All aboard.

There are vending machines in the train station. Dimitri, unfortunately, has no change to buy anything from them with, and they don’t look like they take cash bills. It’s always either change or tap, and he sure can’t tap.

Thankfully, no one else can, either. Byleth stops in front of a brightly-coloured vending machine with her hands in her pockets. “Does anyone want a drink?” she asks. “I don’t think there’s bathrooms on the train, but we might want to bring something with us once we get to Enbarr.”

“Water,” Dimitri mumbles, and she must hear it, because she hits the button and goes to pay. He almost thinks she’ll just tap her wrist to the machine and expose everything as a lie, let him wake up into reality, but then she takes a coin purse out from some pocket inside her jacket and dumps all the contents into her palm, and starts to count them agonizingly slowly.

The world moves on around them, their oddball party of four standing beside the circus-print vending machine like a bunch of hooligans. Dimitri can only imagine how he looks, tall as he is with his eyepatch and scraggly hair blocking half his face. Claude comes up to his chin, and Byleth to his chin, and Edelgard to hers. Still, short as Edelgard is, it’s hard to ignore the glaring lavender of her eyes, too familiar for comfort.

(Edelgard’s not a common name.)

“Fuck,” Byleth hisses under her breath, still counting coins. Her purse, shaped like a cartoonish cat head, tumbles to the ground, and the three of them standing around her dive for it; Claude gets there first because he’s not holding anything, except maybe his light manipulation equipment strapped to his arms. “Thanks.”

Having seemingly given up on counting, she shovels coins into the slot unceremoniously. The number keeps rising— _320 G, 330 G, 430 G, 440 G._ Something inside the machine clicks, and a series of four successive _thunks_ edge the door to the chute at the bottom open. “Everyone take one,” Byleth announces, funneling the rest of her change back into the purse. The zipper, in most macabre fashion, is across the thing’s mouth.

It’s been years since Dimitri took the train. He’d taken the bus from the suburbs downtown and then an elevator uptown from there, and both of those made him motion sick enough for one lifetime. As the crowds of people start to press in, he wonders if there’ll be seats to spare for all of them when it’s their turn to board.

He entertains himself instead by staring at the map. Fódlan Rail has a few lines in and out of the major cities, creating a vast web that bridges the wasteland of factories beyond. The Adrestia line will take them south to Enbarr, with a few stops in Gronder and Fort Merceus along the way. He stares up at the blue of the Faerghus line, spiralling down from Kleimann to Arianrhod to Remire, then bouncing back north Conand and Tailtean, and finally to Fhirdiad. He’d taken that line down to Remire with Dedue when they’d left Fhirdiad, camping out half a train car with four suitcases between the two of them and a medicated bandage still slapped over his eye.

Someone approaches beside him, staring at the same map on the wall. “Incredible,” Byleth says, “they haven’t changed it.”

“Changed what?”

“The bit at the top.” She taps Fhirdiad on the map, like she knows fully well she’s driving a nail into his heart with each tap. She probably does. “Two years ago they finally finished the Itha line from Fhirdiad up to Sreng. It’s an overnight train. They wake you up at two in the morning to check your passport.”

“You say that as though you’ve been there yourself.”

“Oh, I have. It wasn’t very fun. Not as nice as the overnight from Kupala to Almyra.” She pats his elbow. “Train’s arriving soon.”

He follows her dutifully back to where Edelgard and Claude are waiting. Edelgard has her bag tucked close to her side and her cardigan wrapped neatly around her exposed midriff; Claude’s arms are crossed as so to hide the telltale lumps of his gear in his sleeves. Both of them visibly relax when Byleth approaches. “Right,” she says, “where do you guys usually shop for clothes?”

“Thrift store,” Dimitri and Edelgard blurt at the same time. Claude looks at both of them with deep, deep pity in his eyes.

“Okay, new question. Where do you _want_ to shop for clothes?” She looks apologetic. “We have to go as a group because I only have one card to pay with.”

“I think that would be better answered if we had a directory,” Edelgard says. “Maybe once we get there?”

“Alright. That works.” Byleth snaps her fingers. “Right. The other thing—we need to get you three new cyberspace rigs.”

Whatever else she wants to say is presently drowned out as the train screams its way into the station, the faded silver of the cars shuddering violently as the whole chassis comes to a halt. The doors open with a ding, and a veritable flood of people spill out, dressed for every manner of life imaginable. “Let’s go,” Byleth hisses, and shoves them all in the direction of the train with startling urgency.

That barely gets them onto the train. The doors close snugly around Dimitri’s back with a ding. _DO NOT LEAN AGAINST THE DOORS_ remains a warning heeded by absolutely no one. People shuffle around restlessly as the train screeches in protestation and is forced to grind its wheels and get moving once more.

 _“Thank you for riding Fódlan Rail,”_ says the too-pleasant female voice over the intercom. _“We are now departing from Oghma Station. The next station is Qing’an, Qing’an Station. The doors on the right side will open.”_

Briefly, Dimitri figures he is on the left side of the train, and as such does not need to move. The others, scattered throughout the densely packed bodies, seem to understand this as well. They just need to withstand, what, thirty more minutes of this? An hour?

And then the train _dips._

Remire is a piece of art, really, an architect’s wet dream and worst nightmare all rolled into one. Oghma Station is suspended nearly five hundred meters above ground, precariously balanced between two buildings as the railway snakes between the skyscrapers. The whole rail, Dimitri realizes, is built between buildings, so that if the world does crumble at the feet of fate or dragons or death or whatever it is, the people uptown aren’t the ones affected. Sure, they’ll be terribly inconvenienced, and have lost transport to other cities, but the fragments of rail line will crush downtown underfoot like rats unaware.

At least it’s high enough that they’ll have _some_ time to run.

The first descent goes down a good five storeys, and feels like a million. Dimitri grabs onto the first handrail he finds an open space on and shuts his eyes. Even with his height, he can’t see to the front of the train, and no amount of preparation will save him from the rollercoaster that his stomach goes through. The world might as well be flipping with every metre the train travels.

Every time they descend, the ground shifts a little beneath him. By the third drop he gets the hang of predicting when they go down, but not for how long. That remains painfully unpredictable, and so he grabs on tight and prays he won’t throw up over the next hour.

_“We are now approaching Qing’an Station. The doors on the right side will open. Change here for the Faerghus line.”_

Gradually, the train starts to lose speed and altitude. Everything goes dark for a flash as they pass under a series of bridges, and then the familiar burn of fluorescent indoor lighting shocks Dimitri back to reality. As promised, the doors on the right side open as soon as the train grinds to a stop, and people pour out like water, running off to catch the next train or the subway or whatever it takes to get to their next destination. Just as before, people rush in to take their place: businessmen, cashiers, deadbeat dads, people with hair dyed and natural; the whole world, really, all at once.

Dimitri finds himself squashed against the glass of the doors once more, a familiar head of silver-white hair packed next to him between a man in the loudest leopard print possible and a woman with faint EDM leaking out of her headphones. Edelgard is all scrunched up in the corner, her short stature made painfully clear as she clutches her bag to her stomach and taps away on her cell phone. It’s an older model, and the screen is cracked. She’s sending a text to someone, likely before they leave Remire and lose signal. He doesn’t mean to read over her shoulder, but he doesn’t have much of a choice when there’s nowhere else to go.

> _(10:17) El: she said she has a friend in med school_
> 
> _(10:17) El: a friend who had two crests introduced to her by virus_
> 
> _(10:18) Mina: Oh no… Poor thing_
> 
> _(10:18) Mina: Where are you guys off to now?_
> 
> _(10:18) Mina: And did you call in to work?_
> 
> _(10:18) El: byleth said she’d pull some strings_
> 
> _(10:19) El: we’re headed to enbarr now._

The telltale bubble of the other party texting back pops up. Edelgard tabs out before her sister can respond, and scrolls down, down, down through her contacts until she finds someone else, labelled _BERT_ with a profile picture of solid black.

> _(10:19) ED: okay so are you still hung up on ferdinand disappearing off the face of planet five years ago or can i set you up with a guy from work_
> 
> _(10:19) BERT: Respectfully, Edelgard, what the fuck?_
> 
> _(10:20) ED: dire circumstances had to improvise_
> 
> _(10:20) ED: i’m gonna be in enbarr today btw_

The PA system sings a pleasant tune. _“Thank you for riding Fódlan Rail,”_ the announcer voice says ever-cheerfully. _“We are now departing from Qing’an Station. The next station is Yrling, Yrling Station in Gronder City. The doors on the left side will open.”_

And then the whole train lurches, and everyone stumbles back six and a half steps and grabs on for dear life. Dimitri barely manages to not be bodily thrown into a frail looking woman behind him, grabbing tightly onto the railing above as the train hurls itself out of Remire and across the barren land of factories beyond. They’re heading east, now, southeast and away from the suburbs that he knows so well, the suburbs that he chose in particular because they were so far away from the train and so quiet.

Someone seizes a hold of his backpack straps on his shoulders. He looks down, expecting to shoo off a would-be thief, and instead finds himself locking eyes with Byleth, tucked flush against him with a firm grip on his shoulder. Apparently she’s deemed this hellish train ride more dangerous than the elevator from the day before. “Just a few more stations,” she says. “Only Yrling and Ernahu in Gronder, then Fort Merceus Central, and then Illesia then Grand Enbarr.”

“Are we getting off at Grand Enbarr?”

“We are. There’s a big mall above the station. There used to be a stand in the food court that served really good peach sorbet.” The corners of her eyes crinkle, like she’s remembering something fondly. “I wonder if it’s still there.”

And then, as the train hauls itself over the endless expanse of factories, she leans her head against his collarbone, in the divot where a bullet had once torn through skin and bone and flesh. It had taken him several months to recover from it, and he’d hated the way it looked ever since, mangled and angry in the mirror.

It’s almost as though she knew where to lean, like something guided her to it even with eyes closed. Dimitri watches the train pass through waste and refuse with a fell star pressed to his chest, and for the first time in years breathes easy.

* * *

All in all, the ride to Enbarr takes the better part of the hour. Dimitri’s legs threaten to give way with every step as Byleth leads him and the others into the Grand Enbarr station, situated in the heart of the city. As soon as they scan their passes and take the escalator up to ground level, it’s like a new world altogether: industrial grey replaced with sparkling gold on red brick, people milling about in the season’s latest fashions and trends as some expertly-rigged light system plays the diffusion of light through the crystal chandelier into a million sparkling faeries.

“The trees have grown so tall,” Edelgard mumbles, staring awestruck into the distance. Dimitri follows her line of sight and sees number of spindly oak trees rising out of where any sane designer would have put a fountain. Instead, an area has been set up to mimic a quaint little park as one might see in a video game, with wooden benches and grass that must certainly be fake. Most of the shoppers meticulously avoid the area, as so to prevent staining their polished shoes and spotless hems; the handful that do linger are either lounging across the benches, or stay just longer enough to take a selfie in the pale beige-gold of the miniature forest.

“This is ridiculous,” he says. “What was the budget for this station?”

“I’m told it was in the trillions,” Byleth says dryly. “Now, I don’t know about you three, but I want sorbet. Anyone else in?”

What can they do but follow her? She must know this station well, or about as well as she needs—she points out where the station feeds into various tunnels, giving way to the subway station or the airport line, but doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to the shops. A few times Dimitri is tempted to stop and grab a paper map, but there doesn’t seem to be one available. _DOWNLOAD FREE MAP NOW,_ the kiosks cry, with a wrist scanner placed tantalizingly underneath. He throws a wistful stare at it and moves on.

If the main section of the station was autumn, the food court is summer: everything built of glossy white panels and decorated with tasteful amounts of fake sand and faker plants. The giant dome overhead is lined with curved LED panels, each filling its role as a fragment of an artificial blue sky. All around, robotic waiters scurry from table to restaurant, bearing orders of shawarma and hamburgers and subpar pad thai with coconut water.

“HELLO,” says some voice behind them, buzzy with the sound of a speaker. All four turn to find a robot waiter standing by, raising one arm in a semblance of a wave. The panel on its chest lights up—seriously, what is it with these super affluent establishments and their love of fancy panels?—and displays a message: _PLEASE FOLLOW ME TO YOUR SEAT FOR FOUR (4)._

“Thank you,” Byleth says, and the rest of them chime in hastily after her. Dimitri has to bite back a laugh. He’d grown up around machines like this, going on business trips with his father and staying in hotels every bit as fancy as the one from the night before, but it had never occurred to him to thank the robots servers. Back then, it had been simply enough to thank the human ones, and profusely so given how rowdy he and his playmates were as children. It hasn’t even been a full day, and Byleth’s eccentricities are already rubbing off on all of them.

Their seating arrangement is in a little cubicle of sorts, still decorated in the warm white of the rest of the food court. The table is shaped like a diamond and decorated like the sea, made of some kind of blue resin cast upon sand. _WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO ORDER,_ their server asks.

“The peach sorbet from the Sous-Sol,” Byleth dictates, enunciating every consonant forcefully. “Four of them.” She looks around. “Unless any of you have allergies to peaches or chickpeas.”

None of them do, and the robot waiter rolls away bearing their order with a click and a hiss under its wheels as it rides over some trashed plastic on the floor. The offending piece vanishes mere seconds later, swept up by a cubic cleaning robot. Like everything else in the infernal food court, it sports rounded edges and glossy white surfaces, and seems to chitter to itself merrily as it goes about its life sweeping away trash.

“All of this,” Claude mutters, just loud enough for their table of four to hear, “it’s so _wasteful._ Is all of Enbarr like this?”

Edelgard shakes her head. “Most of it is closer to downtown Remire, to be honest. Enbarr’s kind of famous for its nightlife and art festivals.” She turns her piercing gaze to Byleth, who remains unflinching. “Our friend here just _happened_ to choose the ritziest of Enbarr’s many establishments.”

Byleth doesn’t back down from the challenge. “I wanted sorbet,” she says simply. “And besides, it’s not often I’m being backed by someone with a wallet even more bottomless than mine.”

“For that matter,” Dimitri says, “who _are_ you being backed by?”

She purses her lips. “I don’t know them personally,” she says. “They go by the handle _Immaculate._ Said they knew my father, had the receipts to prove it. So far, they’ve wired me _ten million_ gold for the mission. There’s apparently more to come, if you guys want a share.”

“Okay, so you’re just the middleman here.”

“Well, I do have my own motivations.” Somehow, the USB has found its way into her hand once again. It might be a nervous habit of hers—a plaything, for when every word could set off a million mines. “And I don’t trust this Immaculate figure entirely. Our correspondences seemed to indicate that they had the intention to hire me after all of this is over, and I don’t like being tied down to any one person or one thing.”

The waiter chirps, having returned with their sorbet. It looks absolutely amazing, sliced into rounds of pale pink and dusted with toasted bean flour. “Thank you,” Byleth tells the robot. It lights up with a happy face as a scanner emerges from an opening cavity in its chest, clearly meant for payment. “Oh, is there no cash option available?”

 _:(,_ says the panel.

Her expression grows stormy in a second. “That’s too bad,” she says, flipping the USB in her hand. With no hesitation whatsoever, she taps it to the scanner, the indigo of the plastic shell lit up bright magenta under the red light.

The robot, understandably, takes a moment to process the scan. _Thank you,_ it says, with a warble and a half. _Please ring the bell if you need further assistance!_

(Understandably, three of the table’s occupants turn their baffled gaze to the button in the middle of the table with a little bell printed onto it.)

Then, without any further ado, the damned robot rolls away again, presumably to serve the next table.

“What the fuck,” says Claude, which sums up the situation pretty well.

She shrugs. “My own money,” she clarifies, “because I don’t trust a cent of what Immaculate’s been funnelling my way. All of that’s in a separate account for our business expenses, and for your loved ones if and when we need it.” She picks up her sorbet and gestures with it, the corners of her mouth lifting as she speaks. “This one’s my treat. Consider it an indulgence of mine.”

The spoon seems so small in Dimitri’s hand, more fragile than the thin bones of Byleth’s nimble fingers, but he picks it up all the same, and scoops a bite of sorbet into his mouth. It melts like a Remire winter on the tip of his tongue, a transient existence that reminds him of the aftertaste of peaches and gift boxes of thousand-gold fruit when he was young.

“Oh my god,” Edelgard says, voice muffled, “this is _so_ good. Why didn’t I know about this sooner?”

“Because there’s only one Sous-Sol in all of Enbarr, and none in Remire.” Byleth expertly lifts an entire slice of sorbet out of her bowl and eats it all in a single go. “There’s one in Tailtean and two in Arianrhod, and another in Derdriu.” Equal parts mischief and wistful longing dance in the teal of her eyes; it’s an interesting look on her, but a good one. “And of course the flagship store in Fort Merceus. That’s where I first had this.”

Her attention falls back to her sorbet, and the conversation drops. Dimitri stirs his sorbet in restless circles and tries not to get brain freeze. The table lapses into a comfortable quiet, echoed in with voice all around.

“Where to next?” Claude asks, scraping the last of the bean flour from his bowl. “What’s our strategy?”

“Clothes first,” Byleth says, “and then cyberspace rigs. But that’s upstairs, and the day is still young. We can have lunch first if you want.”

So they do. They do sword-lance-axe to see who gets to ring the bell (unsurprisingly, Byleth wins) and a robot waiter is dispatched to their table almost immediately. They get poutine to share because most of them aren’t very hungry, and then Byleth gets pad thai with shrimp (something about her tone tells Dimitri she’ll be putting it on Immaculate’s tab) and another serving of sorbet, just because she can.

The poutine comes covered in thick curds of Gautier cheese, already starting to get goopy over the otherwise crispy fries. Edelgard and Claude manage to steal a few bites of pad thai off Byleth while she’s occupied with her sorbet. She glares them down and then demolishes the rest of the takeout carton herself within five minutes, sculling noodles with grace and elegance and _alarming_ speed.

It’s a comfortable kind of experience. Just yesterday at this time, Dimitri was on a painfully slow bus to Remire, wondering what kinds of stories he’d have to bring home to Dedue. Now, he’s made… what, two, three new friends? Byleth’s little mind game seems a lot easier to forgive when she’s sitting across from him, cheeks packed full of pad thai and teal eyes blinking owlishly at him. Beside her, Edelgard is lazily scooping up the last of the cheese and gravy with a bent, soggy fry. Claude is reading the label on his water bottle in peace.

Dimitri inhales, exhales. Inhales again.

It feels like he’s young again, without a care in the world, hanging out at the mall with Felix and Ingrid and Sylvain after school, eating hundred-gold ice cream from the fridge at Anna’s. Everything felt so natural back then: the environment, the urban cloister that coddled them and called itself home. After falling so far, somehow Dimitri finds himself in starry-eyed wonder at the beauty and the bounty of the metropolis once more.

So he lives the damning dichotomy of home and here, and here and home, and which one he really belongs to as he looks at yet another storefront selling books or kitchenware or throw pillows and thinks _I wish Dedue were here._ Even when he gets pulled into a clothing store and Byleth starts to pile jeans and t-shirts into his arms to try on, he’s just following through with the motions, shucking off his hoodie while his mind is caught somewhere on the Adrestia line, no doubt already chugging back to Remire.

The clothes she’d picked out are, for lack of a better term, clean. At home, behind closed doors, he’d just wear sweatpants and hoodies, mostly for comfort. If there was a need to go out (usually on grocery runs), he’d find some laundered jeans, probably a crumpled shirt to go with it. Byleth seems to have factored that in when picking an outfit for him: a tasteful blue polo shirt with a little lion embroidered at the chest, paired with dark jeans with a fair amount of stretch. They’re a little big, the size estimated a little wide at the hips, but they’re comfortable, and the fabric is soft and elastic.

There’s a knock on the door of the changeroom stall. “What size shoes do you wear?” Byleth asks, sliding a box under the door. It comes to a stop against Dimitri’s ankle. The giant label on the box indicates that the sneakers, while definitely pleasing to the eye, are a whole size too small for him. “Let me know if you need something different.”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll find my own or something,” he says, opening the door. She’s standing there with hand on hip, thumb tucked protectively over the belt loop where her lanyard is tied. The elastic waistband of her lace tights peaks out snugly under her shorts. Aside from that, she’s ditched the letterman jacket for a sleek black blazer that falls over her hips in a satin shimmer. “Oh, uh—”

She looks up at him, and gives him a smile. “Cute,” she says, pushing the hair out of his face with slender fingers. “Here, turn for a second? And squat a bit, I can’t reach.”

He does as she says, and she gathers up a solid third of his hair, carding it back with her fingers and taking special care to avoid his eyepatch. “That’ll do it,” she murmurs, seemingly producing a hair elastic from nowhere to tie it back. “You can stand up now.”

The Dimitri reflected in a nearby mirror looks like a clean, respectable man—almost like he did before Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals headquarters went up in flames. Like he has something to live for; like he’s young and carefree again.

“You look good,” Byleth tells him earnestly, smoothing down his collar on tiptoe. “Almost like a proper businessman.”

“Thanks. You…” He gestures helplessly at her blazer. “I don’t think you could make anything look bad.”

Something twinkles in her eyes as she rises up again to press a fleeting kiss to his cheek. “Could I, now?”

They check out all together. Dimitri swaps the jeans out for a pair in his own size, and picks a new zip-up hoodie and a graphic t-shirt at Byleth’s urging; Edelgard emerges from the changeroom stalls with a new turtleneck sweater and a red jacket that she seems immensely attached to; Claude throws a spacious backpack in with his small selection of shirts and jeans. Byleth produces a card from inside her letterman jacket to pay for the whole debacle, and they begin the process of sorting out everyone’s purchases. “Once Claude finishes packing his gear and changing,” she says, “we’ll head upstairs. The good electronics stores are all on the second floor.”

“Define _good_ electronic stores,” Dimitri says.

“One that carries what I’m looking for, and won’t sell me out to the government when I find it.”

There’s, of course, the big Shambhala Tech store on the first floor, which she avoids with a wide margin. Dimitri’s first rig was a Shambhala Umbra II, and up until the incident he used an Umbra IV at work. By the looks on the others’ faces, they’re not strangers to Shambhala Tech rigs either.

But Byleth has other designs, and takes them up a flight of stairs to the second floor. It’s a pale mimicry of the seasonal theme, at best: downstairs and the clothing store were spring, and this is winter, barren and lifeless. People pass by with giant floating pigtails streaked in neon colours and platform heels seemingly screwed directly into their feet. It feels more like a place where you’d find a mercenary shopping, like someone uprooted a shady strip mall from downtown Remire and plunked it right in the middle of Enbarr.

It’s a weird kind of anachronism of sorts. Of what Dimitri remembers, Enbarr was always a city of the arts, a more traditional kind of place where you’d break out a bottle of Grado twelve-year whiskey for business meetings. This just feels like the electronic city that he dragged himself through by bus, where people live and breathe cyberspace as some kind of addictive drug. The storefronts are lit up with signs in pale mimicry of the Field, advertising e-cigs and normal cigs and all kinds of bootleg anime merchandise.

“Incredible,” Claude murmurs, “they let all this run? Just one storey above the station?”

“It brings in income,” Byleth explains, not-so subtly pulling Edelgard back away from a bedazzled rack of earrings. “They do regulate the shops, make sure they only sell material goods—usually clothes, electronics, paraphernalia, the like. Most don’t even treat the upper half of the station as, well, part of the station.”

She stops, and with her the three of them stop too. _TECH EMPORIUM,_ reads the sign over the door. “Looks sketchy enough,” she decides, and pushes the door open.

The first thing that hits Dimitri is the smell of damp cardboard and styrofoam. The store is barely lit, dim overhead lights swaying to the clattering beat of an ancient ceiling fan. Shelves built of notched steel tubes painted maroon, carrying electronics of every imaginable type. “Rigs in the second aisle,” Byleth says. “Go crazy, go stupid. I’m gonna see if the clerk has what I’m looking for.”

She turns on her heel and is immediately distracted by a rack of anime merchandise. Dimitri smiles despite himself, and joins the others in the aisle with cyberspace rigs. Edelgard has wrestled one colourful, rumpled cardboard box out of a stack. “Guys, oh my god. Did you guys use one of these when you were younger?” She gestures with the box. The product, as advertised, is _baby’s first rig,_ and is suitably decked out in vivid, childish colours. The Shambhala Tech symbol sits in the bottom right of the box, dented but still legible.

“I will be glad to inform you that I did not, in fact, use one of these when I was younger,” Claude says seriously. “Dad was kind of a nut about limiting my time in the Field when I started. Got used to having the plug pulled while I was surfing.”

Dimitri frowns. “That’s more dangerous than spending extra time in the Field.”

“So I told him!” He spreads his hands helplessly. “Alas. I still ended up being a cyber jockey, so I guess whatever he was trying to do didn’t work.”

They linger around for a while, pretending to browse the rigs (mostly subpar models from cheap brands, vintage rigs that have giant _CARCINOGEN_ stickers stuck on top, and long-discontinued children’s rigs that have since become useless since the legal age to buzz got raised to fourteen), but eventually they all go their ways. Dimitri takes a look through the electric kettles, some brightly decorated with Lilith mascots and floral motifs, but finds himself drawn to Byleth like a magnet in the end.

“I’m looking for a cloaker,” she’s telling the clerk. Her stance has gone from her usual cocky hand-on-hip to almost a battle stance, feet shoulder-width apart and USB tucked protectively in her pocket. “The strongest one you have.”

The poor guy’s eyes go wide. “A cloaker,” he says incredulously. “Ma’am, surely you must understand that we are not allowed to carry those legally—”

“Why do you think I didn’t just hit up Shambhala Tech on the first floor?” she drawls. “Look, it doesn’t matter where it’s from, I don’t care if it’s not one of those fancy counter-routers from Daein, it just needs to be a working cloaker.”

“Yes ma’am,” the clerk squeaks. “Are you purchasing for yourself, or…?”

“That is none of your business.”

“Of course not, ma’am.”

The clerk squats and unlocks something in the counter display, and then ducks further and unlocks something under that. Dimitri watches through the glass and the display lights as the man lifts up a hidden panel under a stack of boxes, and extracts one sleek box. “A Failnaught, Fódlan-made,” he says, clearly still nervous. “I, uh, I’ve never sold one of these things, but market value’s five hundred thousand gold.”

“One million,” she says, hand outstretched as though she’s beckoning for the card reader already. The poor clerk’s eyes practically bugger out of his head. “Yeah. Look, I’m ready to pay. Do you take card?”

“We take anything but biotap,” he says, voice garbled with a healthy mix of fear and respect. Dimitri doesn’t know whether to pity him or laugh at his misfortune. Byleth is a force of nature, after all, even when not armed with a glorified gift card worth ten million gold. She doesn’t bother with wrapping the thing, and literally tosses the box and shoves the cloaking device directly into her pocket the moment it’s given to her. _Yep,_ he thinks, _welcome to the Byleth experience. Congrats on being the fourth most confused person in her presence._

It is at that moment that the lights go out overhead, and the entire store starts to lapse into sudden night. “Huh,” says the clerk, sliding away from the counter and turning on his phone flashlight. “Did the power blow? Usually—”

Somewhere in the mall, someone screams. Dimitri only hears the beginning of it before the warmth at his side takes off. “Byleth!” he yells, still barely adjusted to the darkness.

 _The darkness._ It’s not just the store; the whole mall has gone dark, drowning in chaos as the screaming crescendoes to terrific heights. “Claude, Edelgard,” he shouts, knocking his hand into the edge of the glass display case. “Where are any of you?”

“I got you, buddy,” Claude says from his side, one steadying hand thrown on his shoulder. A moment later, their little corner of the world lights up as Edelgard’s phone beams a path. “Where is she?”

“Out here!”

They all look out the store; Byleth is standing in the doorway, haloed in the light of two phones. Her eyes dance in spectacular turquoise, alive with fire. “You need to close this door and seal the exit,” she yells at the clerk, who has taken to cowering behind the counter. “There is someone in this building with a biological weapon and I don’t know how dangerous it is.” To the three of them, she waves impatiently. “You three! We need to go, _now!”_

She takes off into the darkness, and once again, they follow her into the fray.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! i'm still alive i swear i haven't vanished off the face of the planet yet. a great many things occurred, including me starting the next chapter before i finished this one, and also me finally caving and downloading the ffxiv free trial. ya girl has the mental fortitude of a bag of chips, which is to say basically none  
> again this chapter is very self-indulgent! i spent a lot of time on the train in Japan. it's all very convenient and way quicker than here in Canada. also i love the vending machines. my favourite drink is pocari sweat - the cheapest i found it for at a vending machine was i think 120 yen somewhere in Tokyo! it's kind of weirdly sweet with an aftertaste of salt (?) but it was my favourite drink as a child and it's still one of my favourite today. aside from that kirin's afternoon milk tea is always a classic. please try those out if you have the chance to they're both very good  
> the station names were mostly randomized thanks to my dear friend Mazenryu, who scrambled letters until we found something that sounded pretty!


	6. joyride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _hold on tight,  
>  you know she's a little bit dangerous_

This is what Claude learns six seconds after Byleth takes off like a rocket:

1) She is unapologetically fast—criminally fast, really. He supposes he should have expected this, given her supposed occupation. This isn’t her first rodeo, much less her first rodeo in the dark.

2) Speaking of the dark, somehow she sees way ahead of herself in very little to no light, never once stopping because she crashed into some poor patron or a railing. Edelgard seems to get this memo, and trains her flashlight beam on Byleth instead of the road ahead.

3) Despite everything, Byleth seems just as confused as them. “Are you kidding me,” she says incredulously, turning another corner. “Where’s the fucking control panel? _There has to be at least one!”_

“Probably not on this floor,” Claude suggests, breathless as he catches up to her, dragging Dimitri with him. The poor guy’s probably got fingerprints bruised into his shoulder at this point. “They wouldn’t put the control panel for the entire station in the shadiest corner of the mall.”

“You’re right.” She rummages in her pocket wildly and shoves something into his hand: a small USB drive-like object, not the one perpetually on her lanyard but the one she’d haggled off the clerk at the store. “Dimitri, you’re coming with me. Edelgard, you go with Claude and find a control panel. Text me if there’s any trouble.” Turquoise light dances across her eyes in semicircular motion. “When you get there, I need you to do two things, okay? Turn on the lights, and then _turn on the sprinklers._ I can’t stress how important this is. If they’ve released any gas or the Nemesis virus, our best bet at shutting it down is with water.”

He grimaces. “That’s going to take a lot of manual overrides,” he says, “and I’m not all that great with those—”

“Spare me from it,” she snaps. “Eastern Greengrocer is a subsidiary of Riegan Industries. Use your crest to override it.”

 _Like an arrow to the heart._ Dimitri and Edelgard stare at him in shocked silence. So much for trying to keep that tidbit a secret. “Gotcha,” he manages, throwing on a grin. “Good luck. We’ll keep an eye on you guys.”

Byleth nods, and then she’s grabbing Dimitri by the hand and dragging him off and away. “We’d better get going,” Claude mumbles, even as Edelgard’s flashlight beam drops in shocked silence. “Hey, earth to Edelgard?” He grimaces. “Look, we can talk about my crest later. There’s a mall full of people being poisoned right now!”

“Right,” she says, and raises the light once more. They stampede down the nearest staircase, footsteps echoing louder and louder until they hit the ground, and then they freeze. “Oh, for the love of—where is the grocery store she was talking about?”

“We don’t need to actually get to the grocery store itself, just a control panel. Point the light at the ceiling real quick?”

She does, and scans it around. There are very few signs dangling from the ceiling; the closest one reads _WASHROOMS, VENDING._ “That should be it,” Claude says. “Let’s go—”

Someone crashes into them, apologizing profusely, and the light beam is knocked askew as Edelgard’s phone clatters to the ground and skids away. “The light,” she yells, diving after it; she might have made it, too, if it weren’t for the scream of pain as someone runs into her. “Claude, go!”

It would be significantly easier if he knew _where_ to go. Edelgard’s phone remains a beacon on the ground, probably shattered at this point. The light captures dust and flickers with every foot that steps over it, but in between the heartbeats he finds the path to the little corridor with the promised washrooms and vending machines.

A baby is crying in the washroom, screaming at the top of its lungs as its mother utters desperate pleas. Someone is dialing phone numbers rapidly. The mall doesn’t get any brighter. Claude crashes to the wall and begins to feel for knobs, doors, anything that could indicate an imbedded rig system. It’s almost like he’s playing battleship in the dark, making hits that sink into the water with no knowledge of what could happen. There’s no telling if the darn thing is there at all, or if he’s just befooled himself with hope and imagination.

 _Imagination._ He swears loudly as he shrugs off his new backpack. He’d arrived in Enbarr with his full projection kit and a nearly full battery; why isn’t he making use of it? The zipper shrieks as he throws the bag open and tosses on the first thing he can find—a glove piece—and turns it on, all lights at max. The whole backpack lights up like a lamp, cutting through the haze and casting shadow on the wall panel he’d thrown himself at. Now that there’s light, it’s obvious where the rig is. They didn’t even bother to hide it since it presumably locks any non-employees out.

But Claude has a crest, and that gives him honorary employee status. Hell, it might as well give him honorary CEO status, for all that it works. He uncaps the cloaker device and plugs it into the add-ins socket, and stands back as gold lights spiral outwards from that point. “Smooth,” he says.

There’s a shadow in the corridor. He turns to see Edelgard dusting off her phone. “It’s barely responsive,” she says, showing him the cracked screen, “but I can still text Byleth if things go wrong on our end. Did you find the control panel?”

“Yep.” He turns his light kit off and undoes the Velcro strap holding the glove piece to his hand. “Here, Put this on. I’ll disconnect the rest of the parts from the battery so we can extend the life,” he says. “It’s a closed system, by the way. Doesn’t use polygaleatose, and doesn’t connect to the Field.”

“Neat,” she says. “How do I use it?”

“Imagination.”

It takes a few tries, but she gets a weak stream of light going for him to find the headphones and sensor. “I’ve never actually tried buzzing in while standing up,” he says, going through the once-familiar motions of putting the sensor on his forehead. “Wonder how that’s gonna go.”

“Byleth says to just go,” Edelgard hisses. “We don’t have time for this!”

“Roger that.”

He hits the button, and the world dives into colour.

Immediately, Claude becomes unphysical, his form in the Field stranger to him as his conscious struggles to recall what it is, what it once was; the feeling of a thin layer of data grease around him doesn’t help matters much, except it does as he realizes that’s what the fancy little chip that cost so much did for him, the golden sheen of light present even in the numbers that float around him like a protective bubble. _Failnaught,_ it calls itself, has been programmed to call itself just as Claude has a biological key programmed into him, unto him, by his mother’s genes and her father’s before her, and all of them exist in the electric void all at once so surely he must be caught but Failnaught shields him, hides him under its wings as he styles himself an employee of—what was it again?—Eastern Greengrocer, and takes control over the station.

 _Lights,_ he thinks desperately, and the Field tells him _who are you to tell me what to do?_ and he shoves his genetic code at it and says _fuck you, turn on the lights._ Something gives, and it’s not him. _Great. Now the sprinklers._

The sprinklers give. Distantly, he hears startled yelling, begins to feel the connection die. _Not yet_ is the first thought on his mind, and the connection grounds itself in his conviction. _Cameras. I want to find them. Where’s the chaos coming from?_

A million images fill his mind: families seeking cover, makeup melting, fleeing customers. Finally, he finds them: Dimitri in a fighting stance, Byleth in front of him, a masked figure in all black wheeling a canister in a janitor cart holding them at knifepoint. Byleth dodges a swing and delivers an expert roundhouse kick to the masked figure’s hand, sending the knife flying. Dimitri lunges for it as Byleth tackles the figure and gets a solid handful of punches in before being thrown off.

And then the black fabric begins to smoulder, and Claude watches in horror as the entire figure catches fire. They don’t even flinch—just stand there in flames, beatific grin on their face as they’re consumed head to toe and fire grips their skin and melts it like wax. Byleth peels herself off the ground, and kicks the burning bundle of ash and once-human that is slowly being put out by the sprinklers. She looks like she’s on the verge of tears.

Claude buzzes out, and finds himself sitting on the floor in what feels like blinding daylight. All the lights are back on, and his projection gear has been shoved back into his backpack, sitting in a pile at his side. Edelgard is standing over him, bag handles gripped tightly as though she means to use it as a blunt weapon should anyone approach. “They found the guy,” he croaks. “Up in flames, just like Byleth said.”

“Good, now _clear the evidence,”_ she says desperately. “Try to pin it all on whoever shut off the lights in the first place. We can’t have law enforcement on our tail, not like this.”

He nods and puts the sensor back on his sweaty forehead, and feels the earth drop from beneath his feet once again.

* * *

“Well, that was a disaster and a half,” Byleth sighs, plugging her USB into the wall socket of the hotel room. As soon as the lights stop fizzing, she immediately dumps herself into the couch—a normal-sized one, this time, albeit drowning in cushions. “Sorry about hauling you guys out before I could get you rigs.”

“No, it’s chill,” Claude says. “I think we’re all going to need a break after that… mess.”

As Edelgard had told him to, he’d wiped his tracks immediately after buzzing back in. The nice thing about having a decent crest is that everything is built to bow at your feet. Controlling cyberspace doesn’t get any easier, for sure, but at least the chassis laid by your predecessors listens to a crest. It hadn’t taken him long to splice the security camera footage from every angle, and then figure out the entry point of the unknown assailant. Like Claude, they’d had some kind of cloaking device scrambling their identity. He’d taken their user data anyway, just in case he could unscramble it later.

Then Byleth had dragged them all into the street, narrowly avoiding several police investigations being held, and they’d taken the subway to Illesia Ward Station and went up and took the Adrestia line back to Remire, and then the Faerghus line to Fhirdiad. Dimitri stared out the window the whole time, despite seemingly being sick the whole way to Enbarr, so Claude figures he’s probably come back to a home he tried to leave behind, just as Edelgard was so obviously from Enbarr.

That’s okay. Remire is home to a wide assortment of people, and very few born and raised in the city itself. Claude’s been supplanted from home a few times himself, chasing dreams and people and ideas. They clearly don’t want to divulge that information, and frankly, after Byleth outed his crest earlier, he’s not sure he wants to divulge it either.

Fhirdiad is very different from every other place Claude has lived. For once, it’s colder. The towers are built in a way that just begs the flow of wind. For another, _downtown_ is the classy-snazzy part of town, unlike Remire, where luxury extends endlessly into the heavens. Downtown expands sideways instead of upward, and from what precious little Dimitri imparts, it seems like the urbanization growing has done nothing good for the people living on the fringes, like where his now-roommate once lived.

“I like Remire better in that way,” he admits over a dinner of room service steak and pasta. Byleth forewent the meat and opted for a baked queen loach instead, and another carton of chocolate milk. The rest of them poke at their food and swallow their growing plethora of questions. “The suburbs feel safer. Like the inner city won’t invade.”

“Yeah, I get what you mean,” Claude says, stabbing a floret of cauliflower with his fork. It crumples, and he resorts to scooping it up instead. “Back when I first moved in with Hilda and Marianne, the seventy-secondth floor was one of the highest. In the five years since, they’ve built up another fifty storeys. I don’t know where they’re getting the materials from. It’s incredible.”

“Speaking of moving in with your friends,” Edelgard says, fixing him with a look, “I’d be pressed to ask _why_ you had to move in with them in the first place. Perhaps related to a crime you purportedly didn’t commit.”

 _Well, she certainly doesn’t mince words._ It’s too late to back out now. Claude sighs and sets down his utensils. “Yeah. I have the crest of Riegan.” He grins, but it comes out all lopsided and tired. “My granddad’s Oswald von Riegan. CEO of Riegan Industries. I was part of his market analyst team before, well.” He gestures vaguely in the air with both hands. “Hilda and I went to the same high school, and Marianne joined us in… shit, our second last year I think? They took me in.”

“Five years ago,” Dimitri says incredulously, “Godfrey von Riegan was killed en route from Fhirdiad to Derdriu five years ago. Was that…?”

“Right on the money, my friend. That was my uncle.” Claude shrugs. “My grandfather was convinced it was me. I was anywhere _but_ on the road with my uncle.”

He hadn’t even been on cyberspace. He was out getting ice cream with Lysithea and Lorenz at the corner store—shit, it was to celebrate Lysithea finishing chemo, even, and she’d invited a few of her friends from high school to come with them. He’d made a quick friend out of Ignatz, who was also a hobbyist light-player, and then the perfect serenity of the night had been broken when his grandfather called him as the news broadcast overhead showed him his uncle’s body being hauled away in a bag.

Part of him still plays out an elaborate fantasy of _what if it was me?_ every so often: a boy slipping away from his friends, slipping a lethal dose of morphine or fentanyl into his uncle’s coffee, left the sole heir to the empire. But that’s not right; they’d said in the news report he’d been stabbed, not poisoned, though it didn’t really matter what the cause was in the end. Godfrey von Riegan’s heart stopped beating on a Thursday evening, and Oswald saw the ghost of the knife still bloodied in his grandson’s hands.

“Hilda was adamant on taking me in,” Claude says, determined not to dwell too long on the memory. “They were already pretty much done building Twin Pearls, so I didn’t really have much to do there. Left everything behind and all that jazz, stopped buzzing because the old man is nothing if not persistent, and I couldn’t just throw Hilda and Marianne to the wolves after they picked me off the streets.” He washes down the steak with a swig of chocolate milk. It’s sticky-sweet. “So yeah. That’s my sob story.”

Byleth pretends to clap, as though she didn’t know all along. _The traitor._ “Truly inspiring,” she says. “Would it be a bad time to mention that I’m fairly certain our lovely Slithers orchestrated your uncle’s death?”

“No, actually, that seems about right given what happened to your dad—the fentanyl-laced knife and all.” Darn, he’s out of chocolate milk. Somehow, they’ve all taken to drinking it straight from the carton, like schoolchildren (or perhaps just like Byleth). “So you’re saying once we expose their machinations, I’d get my name cleared.”

“Well, yeah, that’s the plan,” she says. “Then you’d be able to return to Riegan Industries.” She tilts her head, and he swears she sees right through him. “Unless you have other plans.”

 _Other plans_ is just continuing at Twin Pearls with Hilda and Marianne for the rest of his days, but being allowed to buzz without fear of having a SWAT team on the seventy-second floor. _Other plans_ is making endless clover clubs for Byleth, basil sprig and all. _Other plans_ exists only in a faraway dream, even more distant than whatever the fuck this situation is.

Once, he would have taken the first chance to return to Riegan Industries in a heartbeat. Now, he’s not sure what he’d do. In a matter of mere days, the world has widened thousandfold.

“Not for now,” he tells her. “I’ll let you know if that changes.”

* * *

See, here’s the thing about the Field: it’s not a good place. Cyberspace fucks with your mind in ways that most scientists thought were too dangerous, and then some guys were like _okay but consider this: we figured out how to tether all of this data to your brain via this extremely irrelevant sugar that your brain might be able to synthesize out of ketone bodies,_ and then they were like _we’re going to market the shit out of this,_ and then it all spiralled out of everyone’s control.

The Field is too large to be under any one person’s control, really. Even the most skilled of cyber jockeys are only good enough at controlling a little bit of it, enough that they don’t go insane from the contact. Byleth had called them “the most brilliant cyber jockeys of the era”, but Claude _knows_ he doesn’t deserve the title, and based on the way Dimitri and Edelgard had reacted, he’s pretty sure they don’t think they’re worthy either.

He’s lost his touch. The light-play equipment behaves the way he wants it to; without his crest, he has no qualms that he wouldn’t have been able to turn on the lights and the sprinkler so quickly, nor would he have been able to wipe his tracks. When Byleth went into the mall, he definitely should have been able to bypass all of its securities with ease. This was muscle memory to him once; now it’s just a distant concept.

It’s just—how do you explain cyberspace to someone who can’t experience it for themself? How do you describe the garden of Eden to a demon without burning them? How do you shatter childish wonder knowing that was once you? Cyberspace just isn’t “is”. It’s too infinite to exist, too vast to be quantified. Words have no meaning in the Field, so they turn to numbers instead. When those don't work, it's a matter of concepts.

"I want you to imagine a rat," Claude says. Byleth makes a face, but closes her eyes and nods. Her chin digs into his ribs as she lays her head on his chest. “Like, your average Fódlan subway rat. Now imagine that you extend a hand and pat it on the head, and it turns, I dunno, bright green. And then you pat it again, and it changes to purple, and then to orange. And if you don't pat it, after a while it turns grey and runs away."

"Is that what cyberspace is like?"

"Uh, no, I just remembered meeting a bunch of rats like that the first time I buzzed in." He runs his fingers down her still-damp hair, clinging to her body in rivulets. Even her lashes, long and thin, are the same dark teal. “You can open your eyes now, y’know.”

Slowly, she opens her eyes; they almost shine in the half-light of the room, flecks of dancing pink interspersed in the weave of her irises. It’s almost as though she’s wearing contacts. “You have beautiful eyes,” she says, as if she’s not the one with the stars in her eyes and the smallest smatter of freckles across the height of her cheekbones.

“I could say the same for you.” He watches for the subtle change to signal that she’s pleased, and finds none; he tries again. “Teal with pink highlights, definitely not my first choice of colours. Who did the lens work for you?”

Now there’s the twitch of her lips, the squeeze of the corners of her eyes. “You’re certainly observative,” she says, leaning forwards to press a kiss to the underside of his jaw. “The lens work was a few years back, so I can’t remember the exact clinic, but it was in Abyss.” Her irises seem to turn and lock, which Claude had initially thought was just light reflecting off the colours. Now, from up close, he can see the parts hidden beneath the colour, shifting and turning on a near-microscopic scale. “How’d you realize?”

“You saw too far ahead into the dark for comfort.” He pokes her cheek with a curious finger. She pouts cutely. “And besides, when we were dancing in Twin Pearls, your eyes reacted way too much to my light projections.” He smirks. “Camera couldn’t quite focus?”

“Something like that. Don’t push your luck.”

“I won’t. Besides, you saved us early. In Enbarr, I mean.” He brushes his thumb over her half-shut eyelid, feeling only the graze of her thick lashes. “You saw the viral particles and figured out what was wrong before any of us even realized the lights were off, didn’t you.”

“You really don’t give yourself enough credit,” she muses, catching his hand. The pads of her fingertips are rough and dry, as though well-weathered around the grip of a pistol. They’re warm against his sternum, his collarbone, his throat. “You’re right. My sensors detected viral concentration at six parts per million in the air, which isn’t enough to infect us, but that just meant we were far enough from the epicenter. From there, it was just figuring out where we were in the mall, then figuring out where _they_ were in the mall.” She sighs against his collarbone. “Too bad we couldn’t catch them. I’m just glad everyone escaped unharmed.”

“But they didn’t,” he says. “How many people inhaled the virus before I turned on the sprinklers? How many people went home and stopped being able to buzz? How many people are going to lose their jobs because of it?”

Byleth is silent. “I don’t know,” she finally says, quietly. “I wish I had a cure, you know. The Nemesis virus isn’t contagious, but for all that it’s shutting down cyberspace as we know it might as well be. But I barely know anything about biocybernetics, much less viral genetic engineering.” She pushes her face against his chest. “I wish I did. All I can do now is try and staunch the bleeding.”

They stay like that for a bit, Claude’s arms wrapped around her and her hands roaming languidly across his collarbone, his shoulders, his neck. Her fingers, warm as they are, dance a path up the his throat that sends a shiver down his spine. Here in the warmth of the hotel bed, she doesn’t seem so cold, so lonely like she was in the seat at the counter in Twin Pearls. Even though he knows at least a little bit of her is mechanical now, she has seemed so real, so alive.

“I need you to promise me something,” she says, and in this moment Claude couldn’t refuse her anything if he tried. “When the three of you buzz, I need you to make sure there’s only one person on at a time. Even if you’re all on different rigs, or if you’re taking turns on the hotel-provided rig. I don’t want you three catching attention by being on all at once.”

Claude smiles against the crown of her head. “That’s not how cyberspace works,” he says, “but if the lady commands it. I’ll make something up, don’t worry.” He kisses her forehead. “Catch some sleep, wouldja?” he tells her. “It’s been a hell of a day. You need some rest, too.”

A petite yawn escapes her lips, too tender for a girl made of plastic and other sharp things. The pink in her eyes fades to a dim glow as her eyelids start to droop. “You too,” she says. “G’night.”

She’s out within seconds, her breath coming in long drags that are cold against Claude’s bare skin. If he only pretends to sleep, and watches her sleep peacefully in the half-light of the hotel room, then who can blame him?

(And if he’s still pretending to be asleep when she slips out of his arms and leaves like a silent ghost, then that’s none of her business, either.)

* * *

Urgent knocking. Artificial sunlight; early morning. “Claude,” Edelgard hisses from outside, “get up. Wake up.”

Claude’s eyes fly open in an instant. This isn’t Remire, this isn’t the spare bedroom behind Twin Peaks. This is Fhirdiad, some five-star hotel that reeks of lemon and lavender, and _it’s seven in the fucking morning,_ why is Edelgard knocking on his door? “We can’t all be morning people, Princess,” he groans, pushing a stack of pillows away from his face. She sounds _far_ too awake for this hour—a magnitude several orders more awake than him, in fact. “What’s up, what are we doing.”

She’s still decked in hotel pajamas, too, and she’s barefoot. “Byleth just left the room,” she says, equal parts excited and distressed. “I heard the elevator run.”

 _Well, shit._ “Are you absolutely certain,” he says, instantly shocked to life. “She can’t have gotten far, right?”

“Her room’s empty, and the door’s unlocked. But there’s the room rig, and she didn’t take the Failnaught from you.” Her eyes narrow. “Are you awake enough to buzz? I’ll order coffee from room service.”

“No coffee on an empty stomach,” he says, turning. At least the hotel pajamas are comfy. “Wake up Dimitri and order some breakfast. I’ll get to work on the rig.”

The Failnaught is still in the pocket of his new jeans, protectively snug against his skin when he wears them. He splashes his face with cold water once to psych himself up to buzz, and heads to the common living space. Just as before, he puts the panel up and plugs the tiny chip on the tip of the device in.

When he buzzes, his crest takes over for him, like one might clear the way ahead of a battle with a bow and arrow. It goes something like this: data gets encrypted with a segment of his DNA, traceable only through his organic signature. He shares this precious bit of genetic material with his grandfather, and his uncle six feet under, and of course his mother, who had the good grace to pass it to him in the first place. All across Fódlan, thousands if not millions of data packets are locked, and the key is quite literally contained in his genes.

He considers himself lucky for it.

Of course, the crest of Riegan can only open the doors it locked to begin with. Hilda’s got one of those crests that doesn’t unlock much—the crest of Goneril, a tidy ring of keys for a nice mansion in downtown Derdriu and a handful of trust funds to go with it. Claude’s grandfather felt the need to slap his personal signature over his entire business alliance, and as a result Claude has a plethora of targets to sample from. _Show me cameras,_ he tells the Field, and it shows him cameras: in front of convenience stores, behind apartment complexes, wired from the top floor all the way down, and finally to Byleth, fashionably out-of-place with her letterman jacket in a crowd of blazers.

He hops to the next camera as she starts to leave the frame, and watches as she turns a street corner, _where the hell is she going?_ She pauses outside a building made of mismatched stone and brick, as though damaged. _BLAIDDYD PHARMACEUTICALS_ reads the giant sign overhead, which she seems to take in.

Then, to his astoundment, she goes into the gap _behind_ the building, where the sun don’t shine and Claude can’t hop onto another camera. Moments later, a tall man in a navy blue suit that contrasts _terribly_ against his fiery red hair ducks into the alleyway, presumably for a smoke break as he pulls something from his pocket.

When Byleth emerges from the alleyway a minute later, she has something in hand. She looks both ways, and skips down the street. Whatever the man gave her disappears into her pocket, and Claude watches her vanish into a nearby building—a mall, by the looks of it, one with doors he can’t unlock from this distance.

He buzzes out to the smell of coffee and scrambled eggs. “You’re back,” says a pajama-clad Dimitri, followed by a hasty “good morning.” He hands Claude a mug of steaming coffee, and helps hoist him to his feet. “I’ve been told about the situation. Did you find her?”

“Yep,” Claude says, unplugging the Failnaught before taking his seat with them at the table. “Tracked her all the way to this big building, Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals.”

Dimitri winces. “Blai- _thyd,”_ he says. “The double d is pronounced with a t-h sound.”

Claude raises an eyebrow. _He’s not even trying to conceal it._ “Alright, Blai- _thyd._ There’s this weird gap behind the building where I’m assuming the employees go to smoke or something, because there’s no cameras back there. She ducked into the alleyway, then this guy went in after her.” He gestures with his mug and nearly sloshes hot coffee onto himself. “Tall, navy blue suit, bright fucking orange hair. Anyways, he definitely gave her something, because when she left the alleyway she had something in her hands.” He takes a sip. As per most hotels, the coffee is terrible. “Then she went into a nearby mall, and I couldn’t keep track of her anymore.”

Edelgard stops blowing across the top of her mug (the smell alone tells Claude the contents are bergamot tea) and sets it down. “Well, that’s not what I expected,” she admits. “I thought she was just going to ditch us here.”

“Again, we know too much for her to leave us alone.” Claude digs in his pocket and waves the Failnaught. “Plus, we’re basically unstoppable now. We could find her anywhere now that I’m in the Field. We could counter-mercenary the mercenary, is what I’m saying.”

“Wait, run that by me again.”

“What, counter-mercenary the mercenary?”

“No, the line before that,” Edelgard says, brow furrowed. “You said we could find her anywhere. Doesn’t that hold true, even now? Couldn’t we verify her identity as she claims it?”

The idea hangs in the air for a few seconds. Twin stares bore into Claude. He groans. “Yeah, okay, got it, give me a sec.” He pours a liberal amount of sugar and cream into his coffee, stirs, and downs the whole mug. It burns the back of his throat and his esophagus on its way down. “You guys owe me the best breakfast item on the menu after this.”

The Failnaught seems to almost hum when he plugs it in. There’s a little red button on the handheld part that lights up with a little sigil that might be a bow or a crescent moon. He presses it, and the whole rig system lights up in gold again. “Oh, neat.” He slips the headset on. “Cool. Be right back.”

This time, when he dives in, there’s that neat layer of data glaze around him again—not that it was ever gone, but it just feels thicker, like his mind is wading through mud with galoshes on instead of having a layer glue encrusted on his skin. The Field comes to him with lists at his command, and for a moment he feels like he’s sixteen and working data entry for his mom behind his father’s back again, _you can have a taste of the Field in a work setting if you help me with these numbers, Khalid._ His memory presents a clear image of Byleth, teal hair and pink lips and teal-and-pink eyes in all sorts of light, and the databases whirr and comb and card and return one result.

 _Can you print,_ he asks the rig, and indeed by some dumb luck it’s hooked up to a printer. He hears it clicking as he buzzes out, and grabs the paper before it can fall to the ground. “Sitri von Sirius,” he reads, handing the page to a waiting Edelgard before returning to pack up the rig, take his Failnaught and shut the panel. “What’s there to eat?”

“This hideously large breakfast burrito,” Edelgard says, gesturing. “And that’s Professor Sitri von Sirius, I think. She has—one, two— _three_ whole degrees, oh my god. A PhD in theoretical biocybernetics at the Cathedral up in Garreg Mach.”

Claude sits down to the hideously large breakfast burrito. Even cut into two, it is just as Edelgard described it: hideously large, and filled to the brim with fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, ham, bacon, peppers and cheese, and more of it that any living person on this mortal coil should be allowed to eat for breakfast. “What the fuck,” he says. “I can’t eat all this.”

“You told us to get you the best breakfast item on the menu, and this had the highest rating,” she says accusingly. “You brought this upon yourself.”

“Wait, hideously large breakfast burrito problems aside, we have another issue.” Dimitri plucks the page from Edelgard’s loose grasp and lays it flat on the table. “How old do you guys figure Byleth is? Thirty, tops?”

“Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have joked about her being a sugar mommy.”

“Because Professor Sitri von Sirius was born in ‘32, which would make her… fifty-six years old.” He taps the page. “Moreover, we have a bigger problem. Date of death is listed as twentieth of Horsebow, ‘59. The lady’s been dead for twenty-nine years.”

Claude makes a face. “The facial recognition held to ninety-eight percent,” he says, bringing a wedge of the hideously large breakfast burrito to his mouth. “Which would be great on its own, but what was _really_ weird was that there were _no_ other matches that even came close. Everything else was, like, below thirty percent. Honestly, if it’s not her I’ll eat my own hat.” For good measure, he takes a bite of the hideously large breakfast burrito. True to its word, it is very, very good.

“Okay, so either she’s not Sitri von Sirius and she’s just not in the database,” Dimitri says, “or she _is_ Sitri von Sirius and she somehow faked her death and conned us all into thinking she’s under thirty.”

“To be fair, plastic surgery is booming in Archanea,” Claude mutters into his burrito.

“Which is disturbing to think about either way.” Dimitri takes a long sip of his coffee, and proceeds to make a face at it. “She says she can’t buzz. How did she get her name off the database then? And if not, how did she fake her death, and what else is she hiding from us?”

It is precisely at that moment that the elevator dings, the door unlocks, and the three of them freeze like pajama-clad deer in headlights. Byleth walks into their little breakfast parley with a shopping bag at her hip, and stares blankly. “... Good morning,” she says. “I thought you’d all still be asleep by the time I got back.”

“I heard you leave and panicked,” Edelgard says in a high, pinched voice.

“Aw, how kind of you.” She tosses the bag onto the couch, and shucks her jacket off with it. The whole bunch sink into the cushions as Dimitri desperately sweeps the printed page into the garbage bin. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Claude has half a hideously large breakfast burrito he can’t finish.”

“Sounds good.” She opens the minifridge, takes out _yet another carton of chocolate milk,_ cracks it open, and sits down next to him. “Oh, this actually looks really good,” she says, picking up the other wedge of the hideously large breakfast burrito. “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“It’s all yours, uh, Professor.”

Everyone at the table goes immediately rigid. Claude inwardly curses himself a million times over for being the stupidest, most reckless fool with no brain cells, and longs for more subpar coffee. “Professor,” Byleth says, setting down the hideously large breakfast burrito. She actually looks amused. “That’s one I haven’t heard.”

“We searched you up in a database while you were away,” Dimitri blurts. Edelgard smacks a hand to her forehead. “The only person that came up had three degrees in biocybernetics.”

Byleth stares at him, then at her, and then at Claude. Then, wonder of wonders, she honest-to-god _giggles_ into her hand. The three of them stare at her in dumbfounded wonder. “I assure you I’ve never gotten a post-secondary education, and I’m definitely not smart enough to study biocybernetics, let alone able to get my brain into cyberspace in the first place.” She takes a bite of the burrito. “What else did your search result tell you?”

“That you’re fifty-six,” Edelgard recites, “and that you died on the 20th of Horsebow in ‘59.”

“Funny you should say that,” Byleth says. “That’s actually my birthday.”

And to that, they have really no response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> got NERFED by orgo midterm but we gucci lads i'm still on track. also i nearly forgot i had a whole psych midterm and barely managed to do it before the window closed lmao  
> the unofficial soundtrack for this chapter is Joyride by Roxette. the other unofficial soundtrack is Dangerous, also by Roxette, because it has the sexy energy i'm trying to carry into 2021 with me. listen to Roxette guys their discography is fantastic  
> props again to my friend Mazenryu for having the dream that inspired the mood rats. some days you just want to have a pet rat, y'know  
> also i'm just now realizing this is in no way, shape or form going to fit into the span of nanowrimo, nor is it going to be under 50k words, so uhhhh expect more come circa-december! we'll see how things go, but i'm projecting a mid-december finish!


	7. convenience store ice cream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna's stocks everything you could ever need, except maybe a life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some violent descriptions of what happened to Edelgard and her siblings. Proceed with caution.

“Incredible,” Edelgard says, turning over the box, “I didn’t realize Charon Inc. made cell phones anymore.”

Byleth shrugs. “I know you shattered your old one,” she says, sounding apologetic. It wasn’t really her fault; Edelgard dropped her phone, and someone panicking in the din slammed into her and kicked it out of her hands. She'd managed to find the damn thing and fight her way to where Claude was trying to buzz, broken as the poor phone was.

Her only regret is that she didn't finish reading the text from Hubert that made her drop it in the first place.

The new phone is—admittedly, not very new. It's an older model, and a refurbished one at that, but the screen has no cracks and it plays music fine and it doesn't have facial recognition or fingerprint password unlocking functions, so it works. The four of them sit in piles in the common space of the hotel room, eating cheese and grapes from the platter Byleth ordered up from room service as Edelgard fiddles with her new phone and Claude tries to extract the phone card from her old one.

"We'll probably have to plug it in," he finally concedes, setting it down. "And even then, I'm not sure it'll work. Did you bring your charger?"

"Oh. Yes, yes I did." She rummages around in her bag and hoists out a battered cable. "Is it out of battery?"

"Mostly, I think. The main problem is that I can't actually access the phone card unless you unlock it. Fucking security protocol," he adds in a mutter. "Anyways, that'll probably have to wait until you can buzz."

Byleth perks up. "No, no need to wait." She crawls over Dimitri's legs and paps him on cheek to rouse him from his napping. He snorts and sits up straight. "I put them in my pocket. Here. I've got your meds for you."

She tosses a bottle to Edelgard, who fumbles and barely just catches it. It's just a normal medicine bottle at first glance, save the slip of paper hastily stuck over the label to conceal it.  _ Aymr, _ it reads on the slip of paper.  _ Polygaleatose 100mg _ is what the label underneath says.

"Are you kidding me," she says out loud. "It's possible to isolate polygaleatose now?"

"Er, it's not isolated, per se," Byleth says. "My contact tells me it's synthesized. This isn't organic polygaleatose—I think it's different at one carbon on the sugar, so that the enzyme doesn't chew it up or something. Either way, it’s singlehandedly been one of the hardest things on my shopping list to get a hold of."

At the other side of the couch, Dimitri is squinting at a medicine bottle of his own. "Areadbhar," he says, "for cyber sickness and data ghosts. The last time I even  _ heard _ of this, it was still undergoing clinical trials. It wasn't projected to be on the market until '94."

Byleth shrugs. "Like I told you, I have friends in the industry. You get all sorts of insider stuff when you know the people developing it. I’ve met the people who actually do make this stuff in the lab before.” She pauses. “And in their apartments.”

“So it’s like a meth lab,” Claude says, turning a cube of cheese over and over in his fingers, “except instead of meth they’re cooking up a batch of polygaleatose. That  _ can’t _ be easy.”

“It really isn’t,” Byleth agrees. “I’ve been told the procedure is akin to making kombucha, except the culture is actively trying to off itself constantly, and if you don’t check on it every few hours it’ll throw up goo all over your kitchen counter.”

Dimitri stares. “What the  _ hell _ is kombucha?”

“Fermented tea thing.” She waves an errant hand. “It’s pretty good. Anyways, go ahead and take those. We can find another good electronics store somewhere else to get you guys rigs. In the meantime, Edelgard, do you want to get your phone set up first, or should I debrief you guys on the next phase of our journey?”

The atmosphere in the room changes immediately. “Did Immaculate contact you again?” Edelgard asks, brow furrowed.

“Got a text this morning.” She waves her phone around; it’s an even older model, probably a burner. Hell, the case even has a little pocket on it that’s the perfect size for an extracted phone card. “A bit more information on them, too. Apparently, they live up in Garreg Mach.”

Claude whistles appreciatively. “First they wire you ten million gold on a whim, and now they’re living up in Garreg Mach? Sounds absolutely wild. Probably some kind of rich heiress or something.”

“More than that. Another ten million just came in for “business expenses”. I don’t know how to tell them that my account’s going to be reviewed if they keep doing this.” She shakes her head as though disapproving the massive amount of free money being funnelled  _ en masse _ in her direction. “Anyways, our next mission is to meet Immaculate up in Garreg Mach. That means we’re flying.”

“Plane tickets to Garreg Mach are  _ ridiculously _ hard to find, though,” Edelgard says, “and they’re stupid expensive.” She pauses for a moment. “Well, I suppose that’s no longer a problem, but my first point still stands. We don’t have enough time to wait for, what, six months for the next set of flights to be available?”

Byleth tilts her head curiously. “We’ll just have to scour the Field for tickets, then,” she says. “If all else fails, I can just threaten someone into selling their tickets to us.” She shrugs, as though this is a legal and morally sound thing to suggest doing. 

Then again, how many laws have they collectively broken over the past few days? Here Edelgard is, sitting crosslegged on the floor of a five-star hotel in a city she lived in once when she was ten, holding a bottle of what might as well be the world’s most illicit drug as a mercenary and probably practiced killer eats prosciutto and drinks chocolate milk on the floor beside her. With them are a former pharmacist (or at least a former pharmacy student, given his age) and a market analyst with an illegal cloaking device.

This is, objectively, the strangest thing to ever happen to Edelgard.

And yet it feels like home. After the explosive monotony of the pachinko parlour, she quite likes the world as it reveals itself to her in the common space of the hotel room. Even though they got off to a rough start, she doesn’t feel like Dimitri and Claude are strangers anymore. Hell, she’s seen them in their pajamas, or at least the hotel-provided ones. They plop themselves on the floor with Byleth and eat crackers and make fun of the shitty coffee and marathon Ghibli movies on the giant TV screen. The one here isn’t the wall-to-wall screen in the Remire hotel, but it’s still respectably large, and more than bright enough for the four of them to fawn over Howl Pendragon while discussing their next step.

“Hey, I know some folks in the airline business,” Claude pipes up. “I can try and secure us a flight that way. I mean, it might not work, but it’s worth a shot.”

“That’d be great,” Byleth says, before turning to Edelgard. “You should take the Aymr now. It takes about fifteen minutes for the meds to get into you, and then I’m told you’ll have a roughly thirty-minute window to buzz. But the thing is—”

Edelgard grimaces. “I’ll build up a tolerance,” she says. “And the enzymes will degrade it faster and faster.”

“Exactly. As such, I’d save those pills for when you  _ absolutely _ need to buzz.” Byleth looks dejected. “I wish I had something better for you.”

It’s almost an apology—probably the most apology she’ll get over something out of both of their control. “It’s better than nothing,” she says. “Thank you for going through the trouble of getting this for me. I really appreciate it.”

She pops one of the capsules in her mouth, and washes it down with coffee before immediately starting to cough and hack, sending the others into a frenzy. “Oh, fuck,” Byleth says, “do either of you know the Heimlich maneuver?”

“I’m fine,” Edelgard wheezes, pounding on her chest. “God, that coffee  _ sucks.” _

* * *

The hotel rig turns out to not be permanently bolted to the wall; she takes it off and sits in her assigned room, crosslegged in the nest of blankets. She turns the sensor over and over in her hand and stares at Claude’s cloaking device, still plugged in after Byleth deemed it safer to do so. The machine feels so familiar in her hands, damningly so.

Seconds tick by loudly with her heartbeat as she looks over the rig. It’s an older model—an Umbra III—and a Shambhala Tech rig nevertheless, but still nowhere near as sleek as the Umbra Xs that the shops in downtown Remire claim to be peddling. It was probably the newest thing on the market when her incident happened, since she’s never buzzed with one of these before.

The timer on her watch reaches zero. She slips the headphones over her head with shaking hands, and lets the sensor slip over her forehead. For the first time, the strands of hair she’s brushing out of its way are silver-white, almost translucent in the light. “Alright,” she says, plugging her old phone into the machine, “let’s make it happen.”

She hits the button.

If Edelgard had to describe moving in cyberspace, it would be with the word  _ flight. _ She’s never liked her corporeal body; among her siblings, she was consistently the shortest, even more so than the twins once they hit their teens, and she's not exactly endowed in other departments. There’s very few things that are appealing about her, aside from maybe her snowy hair that still remains somehow her least favourite part of herself.

But in the Field, she's not bound to her body. She's weightless, formless, flying through numbers and colours with laser precision. There's nothing holding her back as she sweeps across plains of flowing data, given wings of light.

She's free again. That has to count for something.

For most of her high school years, Edelgard ran data. It wasn’t out of necessity—her father, while a businessman and an asshole in many other aspects, was at least kind to his children, long after most of their mothers had fled his side. Rather, it was out of expectation: despite being the third-youngest of eleven, Edelgard was the only one who inherited their father’s crest of Seiros, and as such as the only one who could be trusted with the most important of documents, the highest-paying jobs.

The bloody crest didn’t help her with jack shit in the long run, but it gave her  _ experience. _ She’s been locking and unlocking things since she was fourteen, and if she’s honest with herself longer still. Data was once part of her identity when she buzzed, and even now, years and years after becoming a stranger to the Field, it still very much is.

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to crack into her old phone, tattered as it is. She shuts and locks the door behind her as she retreats into its familiar core, to all the old apps and messages. The data inside greets her, surrounds her affectionately and calms her.  _ Hello, _ she thinks,  _ I have a new home for you. _

She takes all the important stuff, of course: Carmina’s contact information, Hubert’s contact information, all of their texts, her identification numbers and anything that could be used against them all. Even outside the Field, she took to keeping it all in safe places, so that all of it could be deleted in one fell swoop should the phone fall into the wrong hands. Thankfully that’s not the case here; all it did was fall, and as expected, all the important information retreated back into the depths of the hardware, where it was safe.

Data that exists is predictable. It doesn’t take much for her to package it up and lock it in a lonely corner of cyberspace.  _ I’ll be back, _ she tells it, like she’s comforting a lost child. Years ago, it would have been second nature to her. Now it just feels weird to be doing so, when she knows she wouldn’t do the same for an actual child.

What have the years done to her? What kind of innocence did she lose when they dragged her out of hiding, set fire to her veins as someone held a sensor and the muzzle of a gun to her forehead and forced her to buzz?  [ She’s already forgotten more about the Field than most people will ever know ](https://archive.org/stream/NeuromancerWilliamGibson/Neuromancer%20-%20William%20Gibson_djvu.txt) , and perhaps it’s all for the better.

Her options now are to send it off via cyberspace to her new phone, or to connect the damn thing herself. Neither sounds appetizing, but really, she’s the only living person with the crest of Seiros. No one could unlock her data if they tried, unless they put it through her first.

(And even then, she’d rather die than let that happen again.)

There’s not much else in the data of her old phone: some dating app stuff, which she’s more than ready to delete, and a calendar app and a few old songs she liked listening to. Hubert’s damning text before she’d gotten the phone knocked out of her hands just reads  _ I’m meeting up with your coworker now, are you happy? _ which she finds hilarious and bitterly ironic. The notes app is populated mostly by shopping lists and incomprehensible work notes; she deletes them anyway. The photo album is a bit more populated, mostly by goofy photos of Carmina or goofier photos taken  _ by _ Carmina, selfies with Edelgard sleeping in the background. Despite herself, Edelgard has to smile.  _ Leave it to Mina to make me laugh, a hundred miles from home. _

When she goes to unlock the package she’d previously made, though, something changes. It’s always been the icon of the crest of Seiros that flares up when she unlocks things. Instead, a winged icon sears itself under her touch in bright crimson. The lock burns away and smoulders, even as she packs the photos in and seals it back up. The flames grow into the neon landscape, licking at her limbs and flooding her veins with gasoline.

_ “I told you,” _ her father whispers. He is burning in her peripherals, reaching out to the contents of her phone. Carmina’s contact information, Hubert’s contact information, all of that is there—data that could kill them. Her father, after all, had the crest of Seiros too.  _ “I told you to protect yourself, Edelgard. How could you try and save your sister when you couldn’t even save yourself?” _

_ Shut up, _ she tries to say, voice garbled in the thick smog of cyberspace.  _ Shut up shut up shut up you’re not real you’re not real— _

A  _ twang _ resounds through her bones. Her whole body reacts violently; she is thrown into a pile of her own white hair, shivering and burning all at once. Her throat hurts.

Byleth is standing over her. She must have forced a buzz-out, hit the emergency shut-down. “Sensor off,” she orders, though her voice is a magnitude softer as she hands Edelgard a cup of water. “You made it just past twenty minutes. The polygaleatose must have worn off.”

“Fuck. I could have made it longer.”

“No, you couldn’t.” Something dangerous flickers in Byleth’s eyes, whispers of baby blue and lightning. “You wouldn’t. What did you see?”

It’s only then that she realizes neither Dimitri nor Claude are in the room. Byleth must have shooed them out or something. This, too, is something she has to keep from them. “Data ghost,” she says. “Not a regular one. Probably just a side effect of buzzing in for the first time in ages—”

“Okay, let me rephrase this: who did you see?”

Edelgard closes her mouth. “My father,” she says, “the day he died.”

Byleth hums and sits down next to her on the bed, thighs pressing close to Edelgard’s as she strokes the hair from her face and removes the headset, step by step. “How’d you figure out what was wrong?” Edelgard asks. “You’ve never buzzed.”

“No, but I followed someone who did for years.” Her hand skims Edelgard’s cheekbone, high and proud as it is. “My dad had nightmares more often than he did data ghosts, but I suppose a lot of the symptoms are the same.” She pauses, face mere inches from Edelgard’s. “Did you know he worked for Seiros Security as a data runner?”

“No way.”

“Way. I mean, I don’t think you can check now, but he’s there. Jeralt Reus Eisner. God-tier data runner for his time, but he preferred cyber security. He did long-term stints for Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals.”

Again,  _ Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals. _ It always comes back to them, somehow, the source of all of Edelgard’s problems. Apparently Byleth doesn’t see anything wrong with them. “Is that why you have contacts there?”

“No. Those are of my own volition.” She pokes Edelgard in the nose playfully. “He wasn’t at Seiros Security long, anyhow. He got hired at some research facility, met my mother, married her, and then…” She shrugs. “I don’t know. My mother died carrying me, and my dad took me to the road. We never stayed anywhere for long, and I’ve never bothered to find out more about them. He had things he wanted to keep buried, too.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Edelgard murmurs, thinking of a man burning to nothing on the floor of his office, “I really do.”

* * *

“Hey. Come look at this.”

Dimitri rounds the corner to look where Edelgard is pointing. “They sell  _ mayo _ in convenience stores?”

“You don’t get around much, do you.” She picks up the package with her free hand, examining the tiny squeeze bottle. Cute as it is, it doesn’t join the rest of the purchase perspectives in her basket. “The condiment aisle is usually one of the best-stocked in Anna’s because no one thinks they’re there.”

The four of them drew straws to see who had to go get dinner, owing to the fact that Byleth had ordered every single meal off room service and was summarily bored of “rich people food”. That had led into a four-way debate over food choices; Dimitri’s plea for more mac-n-cheese went largely unheard, while Edelgard’s bakery request was shot down by everyone present. In the end, Byleth just handed them a wad of cash, told them to bring her back some ice cream, and went back to sleep.

So here they are. Claude’s winning suggestion (poke bowls, with fresh trout and little chunks of Airmid goby in the rice) led them down several small streets, and the owner gave them extra edamame and seaweed after hearing of how far they’d trekked. Edelgard spotted an Anna’s convenience store on their way back, and the rest is history.

“I’m going to check out the drink fridge,” Dimitri says, pointing with his thumb. Edelgard makes a noise of assent in the back of her throat, pushing around packages of instant curry. “Cool. Thanks.”

Instead of heading to the freezer, Dimitri snakes around to the medicine aisle, tucked behind a rack of increasingly racy magazines. He picks up a bottle of analgesics immediately, the strongest dose available, and books it for the counter. He hands it and several bills of his own money to the cashier. He does not take the change. The cashier raises an eyebrow, and says nothing.

Edelgard finds him at the fridge, comparing two bottles of tea. “Bergamot,” she drawls, and he practically  _ jumps _ at the sound. “Relax, it’s just me.”

“You want bergamot?”

“Almyran pine for Claude, the canned one, he gets them from the vending machine downstairs. And Byleth…” Her voice trails off into silence as they contemplate their companion’s tea-drinking habits. “I don’t know. Get her a coffee or a soda or something.” She glances away. “Do you want a jelly pack?”

He grunts. She takes it as a yes, and starts to stride over to the front of the store, where they’re sold. On the way there, she takes a sudden detour: snakes around to the medicine aisle, tucked behind a rack of increasingly racy magazines. She picks up a tube of scar cream, tugging down her sleeves while she’s at it, and books it for the counter. She hands it and several bills of her own money to the cashier. She does not take the change.

The cashier raises an eyebrow, and says nothing.

Dimitri ends up picking a sparkling fruit juice for Byleth, and a bottled chamomile for himself. Edelgard grabs one of each of the four available protein jelly pouches, each lined with a different colour. The cashier watches them converse and bicker, eyes attuned to the bottle-shaped lump in Dimitri’s jacket pocket and the tube of cream tucked up Edelgard’s sleeve.

“Those aren’t as good as these ones,” Edelgard scowls, smacking her package of slightly-crumpled pastries against Dimitri’s knuckles. “You’ve never bought convenience store sweet buns, have you.”

“Hey, Dedue does most of the cooking usually, I don’t need to buy fucking convenience store sweet buns.” He scowls right back at her—a touch more intimidating because of his height, but she doesn’t cave. “And besides, they’re cheaper.”

“Yeah, by literally forty gold.”

“It adds up when you’re getting so many.”

“Money’s not a problem anymore!”

Dimitri’s brow furrows. “It’s Byleth’s money,” he insists. “We shouldn’t be spending it with wild abandon.”

“It’s Immaculate’s money, for the love of—” She swaps one package for the other and gestures deliberately at the basket. “Happy now?”

“Very.”

The lights overhead flicker once, and return to their cheerful, sterile white. Edelgard glowers. Dimitri shrugs, and hauls his basket towards the ice cream freezer.

The packages are separated by flavour and type in neat little stacks between the dividers _ —149, 170, 99, 200. _ “Well fuck,” says Dimitri, visibly overwhelmed by the choices, “what are we going to get them?”

Edelgard makes an attempt to answer; she does not succeed. She tries again: “I dunno, doesn’t Byleth like sweets?”

So they work with that. Edelgard picks a pack of peach yukimi daifuku for herself, and Dimitri decides to try a tiramisu drumstick. For Claude they decide on a matcha popsicle, because it feels like something he’d like, and for Byleth they silently attempt to make amends over the sweet buns and pick up a cup of ridiculously expensive gelato. It brings the receipt over three thousand gold. They bag their purchases and begin the trek back to the hotel in peace.

“Fhirdiad’s changed so much,” she muses as they pass through a thin street between two monoliths. “Or maybe I just don’t remember enough of it.”

Dimitri looks honestly surprised. “You’ve been here before?”

“Well, yes.” She readjusts her grip on the plastic bags and pulls her cardigan around her midriff. There are people on the street starting to stare at them. “Only briefly, though, when I was a kid. My, uh, mother got married.” She winces. “My father got around. A lot. There were eleven of us by five different women.”

“Oof.”

“Yeah. But he kept doing it anyway. I’m not sure if he was just willing to spend money on a whole gaggle of kids, or putting multiple children in his mistresses and also his wife was just a hobby of his.” She shrugs. “Either way, my mother decided she was done with him after she stopped being his favourite, I guess. I came here with her for the wedding, and then my uncle packed me up and sent me back to my dad.” She smiles thinly, gaze locked on the ground in front of her. Muddy water flows into a grille just beneath the sidewalk, trickling loudly. “Haven’t seen her since.”

It’s an easy enough story to tell. Deadbeat gold-digger mother, dead dad, fucked up family with a penchant for attracting trouble. Her father’s legacy haunts her in the amount of data locked with the crest of Seiros still floating aimlessly across the Field. Lying about her past isn’t going to be productive, not when Byleth could know everything about her in a heartbeat.

But it’s not all that hard to keep a few details secret. Like the fact that her deadbeat mother is dead, too, dead in a shootout that took the lives of several others with her. It made national news that she’d nearly skipped because she’d been waitressing at a 24-hour cafe at the time. She hadn’t known whether to feel relieved or devastated, and she’d lasted another two days of work before having the worst fever of her life and passing out on the clock.

(It’s like tragedy is hell-bent on finding her, wherever she goes.)

“But hey, at least I got to stay with Mina,” she says, “and I couldn’t ask for a better friend, or a better sister.” A bright red sign decorated with cartoon octopuses catches her attention. “Oh my god, can we stop and get takoyaki?”

They do stop and get takoyaki, and the vendor watches and listens in clear amusement as Edelgard explains to Dimitri what they are. “So it’s like a fluffy egg batter,” he summarizes, sounding absolutely baffled, “with shredded cabbage and pickled ginger and boiled octopus, and then you cook it into a ball and drizzle sauce on it?”

“That’s the gist of it.”

“Fucking wild. Is this Dagdan street food?”

“It’s actually from Hoshido,” the vendor says. “A bit farther west. If you’re looking for Dagdan street food, you’re on the wrong street.” They finish dressing the takoyaki with sauce, then expertly squeeze mayonnaise on top, and sprinkle liberal amounts of bonito flakes and seaweed on top of that. “Five hundred gold, lads.”

Edelgard pays with what’s left of the stack Byleth handed them before they left. With their cautious spending at the convenience store and the conservatively frivolous poke bowls, there’s still plenty leftover. “We should try and get back quickly,” she says, “so they don’t get soggy. They’re best crispy and straight out of the box.”

They make it back in record time; Dimitri seems exceptionally excited about street food for someone who was willing to eat the godawfully rich macaroni and cheese from the hotel in Remire. “We’re back,” Edelgard announces, marching in to dump her quarry on the table. There’s already several glasses and a bottle of opened Grado twelve-year there. “I see we’re already drinking.”

Dimitri frowns. “It’s only six-thirty,” he says disapprovingly to the mass of couch. “Why are we drinking at six-thirty?”

“Didn’t want to watch  _ Cats _ while sober,” Claude says. He’s already in his pajamas, and his hair is still damp. Byleth is clad in similar garb. Edelgard swallows down the lump in her throat and forces her attention back to the food. “We got about ten minutes in before it became fucking incomprehensible. Can we go back to our Ghibli marathon, please and thank you.”

Yeah, okay, this is a norm Edelgard can get used to. “Let me change into my pajamas,” she says. “Can someone put the ice cream in the freezer before it melts?”

Byleth pops up from the other side of the couch, jostling several cushions onto the floor. “Ice cream? Did someone say ice cream?”

Edelgard laughs a little to herself as she heads back to her own room. Byleth, while cruel in the way she toys with all of their hearts, is impossible not to love in moments like these. When Edelgard emerges again, decked in pajamas, Byleth and Claude have begun to sort the treats and distribute the poke bowls. “Are they all the same?” Byleth asks through a mouth of piping hot takoyaki.

“Yeah. There’s hot sauce at the bottom of the bag, I think.” Edelgard reaches in and fishes out a handful of sauce packets, napkins and for some reason, several sets of plastic cutlery. “Do you want to use the hotel silverware, or these?”

“No, definitely these. I want to have the full college student experience.”

Dimitri joins them shortly, also clad in pajamas with his hair tied up in an elastic that almost certainly belongs to Byleth. They each grab their poke, move the coffee table closer to the couch for easy access to snacks, and pile up on the couch, squashed together like peas in a truly unfortunate pod. Edelgard is crammed up against Dimitri’s shoulder and Byleth’s hipbone. She couldn’t be more comfortable.

“Okay, so are we feeling more  _ Spirited Away _ or  _ Ponyo _ tonight,” Claude asks, having seized control of the remote. “Or do we want to hit up _Castle in the Sky_ instead?”

_ “Ponyo _ is good,” Byleth says, reaching for the snack bag. Her eyes light up as she takes out the sweet buns that Edelgard chose. “Hey, sweet buns. How’d you guys know which ones were my favourites?”

“Oh, you know,” Edelgard says, levelling a triumphant grin at Dimitri, “I had a hunch.”

* * *

Edelgard dreams:

She is eighteen years old. Carmina wears skirts that go down past her knees and Hannelore wears her hair up in a high bun and Isolde wears giant glasses that are always sliding off her nose and Edelgard wears her headset and sensor like a third eye. Their father is alive and the most reliable data encrypter in Fódlan. You would go to him with a few million gold, tell him  _ I’d like this data that can destroy nations sent to so-and-so, _ and he would stroke his white-streaked beard and say  _ I think I can do that for you _ and ask no questions.

She is eighteen, and the world is crashing down. It’s not like the way her mother supposedly dies in fire, in the shootout at Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals a year later; it’s more like this: a person in all black walks in with a voice scrambler one and a mask to cover their face, and demands that her father hand over the key to his empire. When he doesn’t comply, the person pulls out a gun, and shoots Hannelore in the head.  _ I’ll say it again. Your crest. I have great need of it. _

Edelgard is in the back room doing a delivery when this all goes down. She does not hear the gunshot; Carmina does, and slams the emergency shut-down.  _ There’s someone there, _ she says,  _ and they shot Hannelore. They’re threatening Father. El, you need to run. _

Another gunshot. Isolde screams and cries. Isolde never cries.  _ Now, _ Carmina begs.  _ El, I don’t want you to die. _

That’s what gets her moving, really, knowing that Carmina is scared, for  _ her _ of all people, but there’s only so much space in the office, and only so many people, and the masked intruder shoots Ionius and Cosimo and the twins too, and in the end Mr. von Vestra steps into the office with a knife and holds Edelgard against the floor as her father smiles beatifically at her one last time and bursts into flame, burning to nothing in an instant—

Edelgard wakes up, not screaming but with a gasp. The room is still dark, because of course no natural sunlight could get down to the twelfth floor if it bloody tried. There was a body next to hers when she fell asleep. Briefly, she mourns the loss of Byleth’s arm strewn carelessly over her stomach.

Her focus starts returning to her, slowly, as she sees Byleth sitting on the edge of the bed. It’s no secret that this is how she’s been spending her nights, passing the twilight hours in one of their beds, and creeping back to her own as soon as the edge of dawn peeks in from the electronic window. If there’s anything Edelgard could ever bring herself to hate about Byleth, it would be this, the slinking around and the iron grip she has on Edelgard’s heart.

There is a web of scars that mar Byleth’s back; Edelgard put a few there herself, but the rest look like far larger injuries, and far older. She tugs the shoulder straps of her bra over her arms, and for a moment fumbles with the hooks and eyes in the back, like her fingers the texture of sandpaper are slipping on the fabric and metal. A few tries, and she finally gets it, contorting like a cat to arch her back and lift her hair out from under the straps.

Edelgard puts her palm flat against the small of Byleth’s back. The other girl nearly jumps from the contact. “Hey,” Edelgard croaks. “Leaving already?”

Byleth is silent for a moment. “No,” she says, turning back around to face Edelgard. Her lips are still pale with sleep. “Did I wake you up?”

“No. But I wish you had.”

She reaches out, and Byleth catches her hand, turning her palm upward to drop a kiss to her wrist. “Don’t go,” she says.  _ Please _ goes unsaid. They’re beyond such niceties now.

“I’m sorry,” Byleth says into the curve of her wrist. “I’m not used to staying the night.”

“Then don’t stay the night. Just for a while.”

It’s only like this that she manages to coax Byleth into sliding back into the warm bed with her, the black cotton of her bra pressed into Edelgard’s abdomen. Even though Edelgard is significantly smaller, it’s always like this with Byleth, her warm breath oscillating gently over Edelgard’s sternum. “Stop picking at the scars,” she says. “You’re never going to heal.”

“You never left scars.”

“Not me.” She lifts Edelgard’s arm; when did she get to see the bare skin, when Edelgard hasn’t dared wear anything but long sleeves for years? “... Did it hurt?”

Edelgard inhales sharply. “Like they were pouring gasoline into my veins,” she whispers. “Six needles in each arm. I blacked out most of the pain, and when I woke up, I…” She shakes her head. “My ex came to get me in the hospital. A… mutual friend of ours found out where my sister was, and they got the two of us to Remire. I don’t remember most of it, to be honest.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.” Byleth presses closer, tugs at the small of Edelgard’s back until their bodies are flush against each other again. “I really don’t say this lightly, but I can’t believe you’re not dead. I’ve known people twice your size who have died to far less.”

Edelgard scoffs into her hair. It smells like hotel shampoo. “It’s not hard to find people twice my size.”

“You know what I mean. Even when you’ve gone through so much, your body hasn’t given out,” she says into Edelgard’s chest. “You’re resilient. I like that about you.”

And even if Edelgard doesn’t like her own body that much, if it’s something that Byleth can revere like this, maybe she can learn to love it, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god i want poke. there's this poke place literally just a bus ride from my house and i went there with my friends before university started and i want their wasabi octopus poke so badly. if you're reading this after november 2020, hi, present Marg is writing from in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, and has not left her house in two weeks thanks to midterms and finals and as such cannot get poke  
> the line with a link takes you to an archive of the book Neuromancer, and it's because the line itself is referenced from the book! i honestly hated Neuromancer when i was studying it, but then it grew on me to the point where i wrote a whole research paper on it, which was fun. i really do recommend giving it a read, it's a fantastic book and i still learn something new about Gibson's style every time i read it  
> and i think there's something to be learned from this nanowrimo too, in that you can absolutely write self-indulgent things for the sake of self-indulgence. i miss poke bowls and konbini ice cream and kombucha and doing dumb shit with my friends and all that jazz, and y'know what? writing about it isn't the same as the real thing, but it does give me a little serotonin in these troubling times. write your self-indulgent fic, my friends, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise


	8. on the road again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beneath the earth, a snake lies sleeping.

The hotel in Fhirdiad has a gym facility, complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool and every training machine known to man. Dimitri grabs his old t-shirt and picks up a pair of decent shorts from a nearby mall, and hits up the gym whenever he feels the urge to go stand outside the new Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals building and scream again.

In the hospital, they’d made him do physio after the bullet wounds and burns subsided: squats, gentle shoulder rolls until his arms were strong enough, then he gradually worked up strength with increasing sizes of dumbbells. They made him swim, too, but he’d taken one look at the swim trunks available in the nearby stores and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Breathing exercises, dietary plans,  _ so much chicken breast and tuna, _ and all for what? He’d wasted it all away in those months after they’d moved to Remire, anyway, until Dedue had sat him down and said  _ Dimitri, I love you but you need to stop, for your own good. _

He calls Dedue from the gym, too. Maybe it’s because there’s always someone in the room upstairs, that it feels like the walls are caving in on him. No one uses the gym facilities, except for one guy who comes in every morning at six, like  _ jeez, _ who the hell does that? There’s no cameras to witness him on the treadmill, barely-functional laggy cell phone propped up in the cupholder like a speaker as he runs and recounts the only parts of his adventure he safely can to Dedue.

“They’ve started building up instead of out,” he recalls, “but aside from that, it’s mostly… unchanged, really. Uh, there’s a new train station where the mall across from the old Bank of Faerghus building was.”

Dedue hums.  _ “Did it finally go out of business? Good riddance.” _

“I liked that mall,” Dimitri says, frowning. “I used to go to their arcade after school. But it’s gone now.” He thinks. “And, uh. Blaiddyd Pharm. They’ve relocated to the heart of downtown. Bought out… the old Charon Inc. building, you remember how they relocated their headquarters to Conand two years ago.” He pauses for a moment, wondering what other words he could have to offer about the company that was once his birthright, and ended up changing their lives so much instead. “It’s big. I wonder if Rodrigue is still running it.”

_ “Dimitri,” _ Dedue says softly,  _ “you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.” _

An easy escape. He takes it. “But yeah,” he concludes, “we’re staying at the Fhirdiad Summit Hotel, the one under the, uh, that one supermarket you always tell me you miss because they have all the spices you always want to cook with, the one on the thirty-first floor.”

_ “Oh, Ibbott’s.” _

“That’s the one.”

The conversation lapses into silence after that, punctuated only the hum of the treadmill and Dimitri’s pacing. “I wish you could see it,” he says awkwardly. “It’s grown so much since we left.”

Dedue is quiet for a moment on the other side of the line.  _ “You know as well as I do that I haven’t much love for Fhirdiad,” _ he says,  _ “but we really just don’t get fresh chilis in Remire.” _ A moment’s repose.  _ “Tell me about the others. How goes your quest to try every item on the hotel room service menu?” _

“Gave up. The dishes started getting repetitive, so we’ve taken to going out to get food from street vendors. We got poke the other day. And Edelgard taught me what the best foods at an Anna’s convenience store are, and she got me, uh, takoyaki? It’s Hoshidan, apparently.”

_ “Ah, a fellow street food enthusiast,” _ Dedue chuckles.  _ “I imagine now that all of you can buzz again, you have access to delivery services too.” _

“Oh, I hadn’t even thought of that. Byleth makes us go get food in person because she thinks we don’t get enough exercise.” He shakes his head, even though he knows Dedue can’t see him. “We’ve still only got just the one rig in the hotel room. I don’t see why we can’t just call another one up from room service, but she’s really on edge about everything. Says we can’t afford to attract extra attention by having too many people buzzing at once.”

The door creaks on the other side of the room, and Dimitri’s glance snaps over instantly. Byleth leans into the doorway, caught redhanded by an old hinge. She throws him a curious look, and he dimples. “But I think that’s for the best, really,” he says as she crosses the gym to sit on a stationary bike not far from his treadmill. “Honestly, Dedue, I think we’d all be lost without her.”

_ “Sounds about right. I’ve worked with enough cyber jockeys to know that you’d all forgo basic human functions if left unattended. Pass along my thanks to her, would you?” _

“I’ll let her know,” he says, raising an eyebrow at her. “Am I keeping you?”

_ “Not really, but there is a fair amount of dishes I have to get done.” _

“Then I’ll leave you to that.” He stops. “Is there anything you need from Fhirdiad? Spices, clothes,  _ money? _ Literally anything.”

_ “Dimitri, all I want is for you to get back home in one piece after this is all over.” _ Darn, he sounds equal parts amused and disappointed. Something wrenches in the pit of Dimitri’s stomach.  _ “If you’ve got somewhere else to be, then don’t let me keep you.” _

“Alright. I’ll see you, then.”

_ “Mmhmm.” _

The phone shuts off almost immediately after Dedue hangs up on the other side, and Dimitri turns his attention to Byleth, still perched precariously on the seat of the stationary bike. “Your calls are a lot more intimate than I’d expected,” she comments, long legs tucked neatly beneath her. How isn’t she falling off? “I didn’t even call my ex like that.”

“Your  _ ex?” _

“Yeah, he was the one who introduced me to the sorbet at Sous-Sol. We weren’t very good for each other.” She tilts her head, as though curious. “But that’s clearly not the case between you and Dedue.”

He shrugs. “Dedue’s carried me through high and low. I owe him everything. Er, sorry about leaving the room to call.”

“Why shouldn’t you contact him?” Byleth says, as though this is the most obvious thing in the world. “Edelgard’s almost always texting her sister when she’s not buzzing, and Claude calls Twin Pearls nearly every night. You’re not the only one with loved ones to get back to.” She presses her lips together as she hops off the bike—the closest she’ll get to making a face, he imagines. “Claude and Hilda affectionately end their calls with a kindly  _ bitch, _ though I figure that’s because they’ve known each other since high school.”

“That, and Hilda’s married, isn’t she?”

“Right, right.” She offers him a hand. “Anyways, the others were getting worried that you’d vanished off into the streets of Fhirdiad. I figured you were here. We’re deciding what to get for lunch, and I figured you might want to hear the good news.”

Dimitri raises an eyebrow. “The good news?”

She presses a finger to her lips. “I’ll let the one who brought the good news decide.”

The elevator ride isn’t so jarring anymore; maybe he’s gotten used to it. The bell dings, and the elevator deposits them up in their room. Someone’s put on tasteful electro swing, and the room smells of the s’mores toast that Edelgard ordered a week ago and swore she’d never order again. There are champagne flutes filled with flat apple juice on the counter—Byleth banned day-drinking at his behest.

“What,” Dimitri says, “is happening.”

Claude appears grin-first, like some kind of human cheshire cat. “Simple, my friend,” he says, spreading his hands, “I’ve finally secured us plane tickets to Garreg Mach.”

Dimitri stares at him for a second. “How?” he manages. “You checked.  _ I _ checked. We spent two days scouring every single flight company that flies in and out of Fódlan for plane tickets.”

“Ah, cashed in a favour with… some folks I know.” He takes a generous sip of his apple juice. “We’re flying Air Almyra out of Derdriu in a week. I know three in the morning isn’t exactly the optimal time for a flight, but…”

“It’s still a flight,” Byleth says, “which is better than the alternative of not having a flight. Edelgard and I have been sorting out our transportation to Derdriu, in the meantime, and I think I’ve come up with something you guys will like.”

The TV lights up; Dimitri looks over to see Edelgard buzzed in, hooked up to the screen.  _ So she’s figured out how long she has to buzz at a stretch. _ Giant letters and images pop up on the TV:  _ OVERNIGHT UNDERGROUND TRAIN. BRIONAC TO TAILTEAN TO KUPALA. ENTERTAINMENT, FOOD, SERVICES. _

“The Abyss Express,” Byleth explains as Edelgard buzzes out. “It’s supposed to be a tour-de-Fódlan kind of deal. Have you heard of the Archanea Cruise Line? It’s kind of like that, but because Fódlan is severely lacking in aquatic bodies…” She shrugs. “Anyways, it has a lot of the same facilities that you might find on a cruise ship, just on a train. Fine dining, spectacular entertainment, and unfortunately, some less than legal facilities.” Her lips are pressed into a thin line, like she’s savouring the idea. “Much like the flight to Garreg Mach, tickets are in high demand, but in a perfect parallel, I can cash in a favour with some friends.”

“Less than legal facilities,” Dimitri echoes, “such as?”

Byleth shakes her head, and he knows not to press it further. “Let’s just say there’s a reason most people haven’t heard of the train, aside from the ridiculous prices.” The corners of her eyes crinkle, as though she’s thinking of some inside joke. “But yes, we have our solution. We’re going to go to Garreg Mach, and get some answers out of Immaculate.”

She raises her glass, turned to sparkling topaz in the light of the . “To our success,” she shouts. Dimitri can’t help but grin and grab the last flute of apple juice. “To getting some damn answers!”

“To getting some damn answers,” they cheer, and drink to their health.

* * *

Byleth talks to herself a lot.

This isn’t a major discovery, but it is one that surprises Dimitri all the same. Every time he thinks he’s peeled back another layer, she ends up becoming more secretive about things.

Like how she never lets any of them into her room, no matter which hotel they stay in. They never check into anything less than five stars, and almost always a penthouse suite with four rooms where they can get it. She always claims the master bedroom as her own, and won't emerge for hours on end until she slinks to someone's bedroom late at night (and slinks back to her own before dawn). Claude jokingly calls it "quiet hours", but it's anything but: the three of them watch movies and drink fancy champagne, and alone in her room Byleth talks to herself.

Most of it is too muted to be audible. The hotel walls do a good job of being very soundproof—too good, Dimitri thinks. The voice that comes from the room is indeed Byleth's, but who or what she's speaking to, be it to herself or some otherworldly ghost, is still on the fence.

And then there's the problem of whatever the hell her relationship to the three of them is. It's a touchy subject at best, one that they skirt around as much as possible, but Dimitri would drop everything and follow Byleth to the ends of the earth at a second's notice, and he's pretty sure the other two would too, with no hesitation. Does that constitute an open relationship? Would he be okay with that in the long term? As of the time being, he's pretty sure the answer to both is no.

But needless to say, he's made some pretty interesting friends, and he appreciates them and their interesting skillsets. In the hours when Byleth forces them to take breaks from cyberspace ("you have to ease your way back in, you dolts") she teaches them hand-to-hand, easily sweeping even Dimitri with just her bare hands. Dimitri shares what little he knows of cooking from Dedue when a subpar dish comes up from room service; Edelgard shows them the best strategies for playing pachinko.

Right now, Claude is doing a final check over of his light projection gear on Edelgard. "Marianne says this stuff could be carcinogenic in the long run," he says, redoing a few velcro straps at her side, "but again, Marianne's got a tragic backstory fit for an anime protagonist, and you're just doing this once for fun."

"Cool," says Edelgard, sounding all at once much more nervous. "So it's just purely imagination?"

"Damn right it is. The more you focus on what you're trying to project, the clearer it'll be. So if you have an idea on the back burner, it'll keep getting lighter and lighter until it blinks out and passes out of your active memory." He shrugs. "Or something like that. Anyways, hit the button when you're ready."

Edelgard inhales, exhales, and hits the button. A simple image of a bright red polo shirt with a festive monogram blares into existence—the uniform shirt for her pachinko parlour, probably. It wavers for a few seconds before she shuts it off and opens her eyes. "Oh, god," she says, almost breathlessly, "I hadn't realized how hard it is to keep my focus unbreaking on one thing."

“Yep, it takes a lot of practice. You did good for a first time, though.” He pats her on the shoulder; she winces, and he backs off. “Here, it might be easier to project something you’ve seen a billion times before. The less you have to imagine, the easier it’ll be. Like… uh, you play any video games?”

“A few, but not too much.” Edelgard makes a face. “Would a person work?”

Claude’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead. “I mean,” he wheezes, “you  _ could, _ but reconstruction’s hard to get right. It would have to be someone you’ve seen recently, probably.”

_ “I’m telling you,” _ Byleth says in the master bedroom, just loud enough to freeze the three of them in their tracks,  _ “they have to be hiding something.” _

A second, tinnier voice:  _ “I know, I know! For shame, child, don’t you think I’ve considered that already? You weren’t contacted for no reason.” _

Edelgard yanks her phone from her pocket, punches in the password with one finger and selects an app.  _ Record it, _ she mouths, handing it to Dimitri. Out loud, she tells Claude, “so, one of us, probably.”

“Yeah, that works,” Claude says hastily as Dimitri fumbles with the phone. The photo function won’t do them any good; Edelgard hisses  _ video, take a video _ at him, and he swipes the dial to  _ VIDEO. _ “Heck, since I’m right here, try projecting me. You can even zoom in real close and reconstruct all my pores.”

“Very funny, Claude.”

Dimitri hits the record button when he gets close to the door, and presses the phone against the wall. Edelgard and Claude keep up a stream of realistic-enough babble, but all his attention is turned to his ear against the door, and the voices arguing inside.

_ “I don’t want to disappoint them,” _ Byleth is saying.  _ “The three outside, I mean. Not Immaculate. I couldn’t care less about Immaculate. Frankly, if it weren’t for the fact that they keep wiring me money I wouldn’t even be doing this.” _ The bitter in her voice rattles Dimitri’s organs, as though dragging them through a bed of nails.  _ “But they’ve got a point.  _

_ “You have no obligation to keep helping them,” _ says the tinny voice. It’s feminine, for sure, but enveloped in static, as though spoken through a microphone.  _ No, _ Dimitri realizes, listening to the consonants, the voice isn’t just staticky—it’s text-to-speech, albeit very cleverly blended into a facsimile of speech.  _ “There’s nothing stopping you from packing your bags and leaving right now. Why, you don’t even  _ have _ bags to pack.” _

_ “I can’t just let what happened to Dad happen to more people. These three, they’ve got the worst of it. I wish I could do more for Edelgard’s siblings, but there’s just her and her sister left.” _

_ “How frivolous. What can they do for you? Just because they carry crests, doesn’t mean they’re invincible. Look at the girl. She’s got the Nemesis virus.” _

_ “I have the Nemesis virus,” _ Byleth all but shouts. Behind Dimitri, Edelgard and Claude go silent.  _ “Look, we can’t keep boiling this argument down to the same lines. I don’t trust Immaculate. I barely know if I can trust you. I can’t fucking buzz because of my heart condition, they can. The facts are there, and we know someone’s trying to lock everyone out of the Field. If we stop them and find a solution three people’s lives go back to normal. I don’t see what’s not to do.” _

There’s a click and a snap, as though she’s unplugging something, and then footsteps. Dimitri barely manages to hit  _ stop _ on the phone and scramble closer to the other two when she emerges from the room, wearing the same pokerface over a mask of angry red. Her lanyard is no longer on her hip, but hangs around her neck. “What’s up,” she says, USB dangling at her navel. “Why is Edelgard wearing Claude’s light projection stuff?”

“Learning,” Edelgard says weakly, glancing at Dimitri. His heart is pounding out of his chest, but he fakes a half-smile and nods. “Wanna join?”

* * *

Leaving the Fhirdiad Summit Hotel is harder than expected. They hold a mock ceremony to honour the rig for its service, order one last charcuterie platter and chocolate milk for everyone, and make sure they all have their meds. Byleth plugs her USB into the wall one last time before they go, and like clockwork the lights flash on and off in the familiar wave. Dimitri tries hard not to stare into the blinding ceiling as he contemplates what very well be his last trip to Fhirdiad.

The elevator ride seems to take an eternity, if only because of the speed. Their room wasn’t on a very high floor, so the elevator doesn’t send them down to ground floor screaming and gripping the rails for dear life like the one in Remire. There’s enough time for Byleth to extract the packet of bubblegum from inside her jacket, and offer them each one; Dimitri takes one to be polite, and chews through a mouthful of artificial smells before spitting it into a trash can in the train station.

Byleth spends most of the train ride staring into the middle distance and toying with her USB. The lanyard is around her neck again. The stains on either side of the USB, Dimitri realizes, are not in fact stains; the thing is metal, and the blots in the colour of pen ink are a patina rather than paint. A pretty little illusion, made by the fact that the cap is solid blue plastic. What an archaic thing to have and carry around on oneself.

They get off the train at the central station in Tailtean, and then Byleth is pulling Dimitri by the hand into a side door down a barely lit stairwell, spiralling down three flights of stairs. Every storey down, the walls change colour: stone grey, faded green, classy lavender. “Here we go,” she says, and pushes the final door open.

This station is very,  _ very _ different indeed, and houses a very different train. Unlike the Fódlan Rail trains, decked in dirtied silver, this train is completely matte grey, accented in streaks of the same lavender as the walls of the stairwell. It’s also significantly  _ larger— _ the doorway, expanding as high as Dimitri is tall, only reaches half the height of a train car.

“Everyone take your tickets,” Byleth says, digging four slips of paper out from inside her jacket. “They don’t take biotap here. Not that any of us are in any position to do so.”

“Oh, we take biotap now, miss,” says the guy at the boarding line, holding an old-fashioned scanner out and reaching for their tickets. “But the boss believes in accessibility, and I really cannot argue with that.”

He scans their tickets, and beckons them in with a grandiose bow. Dimitri wonders how his top hat stays on his head. “Enjoy your time aboard the Abyss Express.”

The Abyss Express, as it turns out, is a very, very strange place. Dimitri recalls, briefly, Sylvain’s stint with recreational marijuana after his brother was disowned and it became very clear that nothing he did could get him kicked out the same way. The interior of the train has the same feeling as the way Sylvain lived during those months before Felix beat some sense into him: chintzy, expensive but in the cheapest way possible, almost baroque in its decor.

“This is the dinner car,” Byleth says, pulling them through the next door into a lavishly furnished dining hall. Tables line either side of the car, seating groups of three and four decked in gaudy prints and patent leather. “The next car is, admittedly, also dinner. Ah, shit.” She looks around, sees no escape through the corridor filled with busy waiters and fallen cigarette butts, and clearly makes a decision. “Turn around. Edelgard, there’s a door to your left.”

The door, as it turns out, leads to a set of stairs up to the second floor. “How much load does this train have to haul around?” Claude asks, voice echoing through the slim stairwell. The walls seem to rock in response, and Dimitri grasps the handrail tighter. “Scratch that, what the fuck does this train even run on?”

“Money, I presume,” Byleth says nonchalantly. “Burning cash like there’s no tomorrow. But it’s still a haven of sorts, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

The second floor is home to several rooms, packed neatly like a capsule hotel. Each is numbered, and a scanner in between several waits for the key-card tap to presumably open them. “Not quiet hours just yet,” she says, voice lowered, “but we’d best keep our voices down for now. Not everyone… likes knowing they’re heard.” She cranes her neck briefly in the direction of one. “Most of these sleep two. Not that people sleep.”

“Oh.”

They forge on. The next car, also above a dining car, is similarly decked in capsules on either side. “It’s too bad Yuri couldn’t get us normal berths,” she says wistfully. “And here I was hoping for a trip down nostalgia street.”

Another car of capsules, and when Dimitri shares a glance with Edelgard and Claude, it’s clear they’re thinking the same thing: Byleth knows  _ way _ too much about this train for comfort. It’s almost like she  _ lived here, _ in the very same less than legal facilities that she spoke so little of before. What kind of role did she have to play here—the hardened mercenary, peddling the price of a life the way one might a souvenir postcard, or something else entirely?

Before any of them can say something they’ll all regret, Byleth stops at another door. “I wonder if they’re in right now,” she says, and raises her hand to knock twice, swiftly. The chatter on the other side stops almost immediately, and the door opens to a willowy individual with hair the colour of lilacs. 

“Aw, I knew you’d stop by to say hi,” they say, grinning hard enough to put a dent in their glitter eyeshadow as they pull her into a hug. Byleth, to Dimitri’s surprise, actually reciprocates the embrace, and quite willingly so. “It’s been too long, my friend, too long.”

“It really has,” Byleth mumbles into their shirt. “Glad to see you’ve upped your sequin game.”

“Whoops, sorry.” They let her go, and stand in the doorframe with hands on hips. “And you brought friends! Care for an introduction?”

“Oh. Of course.” Byleth turns, as though  _ finally _ remembering that the three people trailing her like lost ducklings exist. “Edelgard. Dimitri. Claude.” She gestures at the person before them, clad in a sequined suit. “Yuri Leclerc, my dear friend.” Something of a smile creeps onto her face, and Dimitri doesn’t know whether he likes it or not. “The current owner of the Abyss Express.”

Yuri grins with all their teeth, and for the first time since he was a boy, Dimitri feels very, very small.

* * *

“The last owner was, to put it lightly, rather business-oriented,” Yuri says, swirling something in their glass. Everyone’s sitting in their room, now, on boxes and chairs and miscellaneous flat surfaces. “He had this whole giant patent for some thing or other in cyberspace rigs, amassed quite a fortune. Decided to use his money to build the Abyss Express.” They click their tongue disapprovingly. “Like a luxury cruise without the water, catering to the richest of the rich. Anyways, he’s gone now. Died under, ah,  _ mysterious circumstances _ a few years back.”

They drain their juice and set the glass aside. “And now it is mine,” they say, spreading their hands. “Or, at the very least, I am the majority shareholder. Most people never find out.”

“I have a few shares,” Byleth pitches in. Dimitri tries not to stare at the way she’s practically joined at the hip to Yuri, almost halfway into their lap. “And the rest are split among… well, you’ll probably get to meet them.”

“Indeed.” Yuri pats her thigh twice—an affectionate gesture, not a wholly intimate one. “Should I call up the others?”

“No, I’ll go.” She gets up. “Are we still set to depart at seven?”

“That would be the time.”

And then, to the surprise of apparently everyone except Yuri themself, she reaches over to ruffle their hair, and leaves the train car. The door clicks shut behind her, and Yuri’s swagger seemingly deflates. “Good god,” they mutter, running a gloved hand through their hair to pat comb it down. “How’d you three end up chasing after her? You look like a bunch of sad, sad schoolchildren.”

“Coincidence, really,” Dimitri mumbles. Yuri stares at him quite intensely, glitter eyeshadow shimmering in the light. “She’s trying to bring down the people who killed her dad. We just all happened to be badly affected by the same people.”

“A win-win solution for everyone.” Yuri shakes their head. “Leave it to Byleth to do that.”

“I don’t get it,” Edelgard says. Everyone present turns to look at her. “She’d no less than implied that this train is home to all sorts of debauchery. Why would she bring us here?” She glares them down. “Byleth may trust you, but you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t.”

“Darn, she’s really just gonna leave me to give this talk?” they groan. “Okay, let me put it like this.” They throw one leg over the other dramatically, cheek propped up on one hand. “Say you have a city full of heroin addicts. Number one cause of death is overdose, followed by transmission of viruses from the sharing of needles and withdrawal symptoms. What do you do?”

They go silent. Yuri smiles. It’s nicer than their unkind grin. “You build safe dosage sites, my friends, all over the city, wherever the addicts are. You wanna eliminate all those death factors?” They tally off their fingers. “Sharing needles is eliminated if you have the resources to supply that, and if you’ve got a hold of all the heroin in the city, then by all means you can stop overdoses. You get those people the resources they need to  _ recover, _ even if it means feeding their addictions. 

“That was the original point of the Abyss Express: to give the most vulnerable people a job, a place to recover. We’re always hiring because people are always in need of somewhere safe. That’s why I charge such a high ticket price. You think I live like this—” they gesture widely at the room around them, “because I think it’s in fashion? No! I’ve had sex workers, vanished people, folks struggling to pay rent come to me crying, and every single one of them left with a roof over their heads and enough to keep themselves and their loved ones afloat.

“That was Mr. Dahlmann’s plan for the Abyss Express, at first. A safe place for people who have sunk lower than low to work. He’d worked up in Garreg Mach for years, student of the Cathedral and all that jazz.” They shrug. “Then he turned it into a get-rich-quick scheme. Some fifty, hundred years back, four researchers at the Cathedral supposedly turned themselves to artificial intelligences and uploaded themselves to the Field. 

“Artificial intelligences?” Claude echoes. “That—as far as I know, that hasn’t been accomplished yet with any organic users.”

“Well, they wouldn’t have told you if they succeeded, would they? Anyways, the old coot found old papers saying they could be unlocked with crests, figured he could ply the four of us into playing his hand. If it weren’t for Byleth, he would have used us to get to it.”

Dimitri inhales sharply. “You said he died under mysterious circumstances a few years ago.”

“Well, yes, pulling the plug on him while he was buzzing with all of our heads tied to his darn machine does count as mysterious circumstances in my opinion,” they say nonchalantly. “Something or other about identity theft. Anyway, Byleth helped. She’s good at finding information that people have tried  _ real hard _ to keep buried.”

“How’d she end up here?” Edelgard asks. She looks smaller than ever before. “Was it after her father died?”

“Shortly afterwards.” Yuri picks at their sequins, pushing them all in one direction. “Mr. Dahlmann claimed to have known her parents. We… don’t know if that was the truth, but he did say some things to Byleth that seemed to prove it to her. She fit the bill for the type we hire—recently orphaned, out of a job, no roots to put down, unable to buzz—but she never really  _ fit, _ y’know? Hard to make a square fit a circle. After the whole business with Mr. Dahlmann, well, she left. Took to the roads. Vanished for five years.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” they agree. “While I’m far from upset over her appearing back in my life, I really have to wonder why.” They lean forward, eyes twinkling. “I’ve told my story. Care to tell yours?”

Dimitri throws an anxious look at the door, but Yuri just laughs and waves it off. “Constance and Hapi will keep her occupied for a long time,” they say. “Now tell me, what’s my dear friend been up to nowadays?”

Claude sighs, sinking into his chair. “Well,” he says, and Dimitri figures this is going to be  _ good, _ “I met these two and Byleth in a bar in uptown Remire…”

* * *

Constance and Hapi, as it turns out, are a married couple much like Claude’s friends. Unlike Hilda and Marianne, though, they don’t run a bar. “Coco does all the finances for the train,” says Hapi, who has twisted herself into something of a human pretzel, “and I’m part of Yuribird’s little circus.”

“She’s our contortionist,” Yuri amends with a frown, “and I don’t run a circus.”

“You have got the ringmaster act down, my dear mockingbird,” Constance snips. She’s a delicate woman, dressed in a high-collared shirt and a skirt that skims her ankles and giant glasses that cast shadows over her entire face. Unlike her wife, who stretches in ways that certainly aren’t humanly possible, Constance sits with her ankles crossed and hands placed neatly in her lap. “Besides, you coordinate the rest of us out of that little office of yours, I think you’ve earned the title.”

“My dear Constance, I wish you wouldn’t call it an office. You know the only office on this train is yours and yours only.”

(It occurs to Dimitri that maybe Yuri’s flirtatious attitude isn’t just something exclusive to Byleth. Some part of him breathes a sigh of relief.)

The topside of this car, it seems, serves as a ballroom of sorts. A ring of chairs is set around a stage, out of which a single pole extends into the ceiling. Tastefully-dimmed LED lights cast shadows in bronze and gold across the room as Yuri’s inner circle entertains their guests, unconventional as they are. Immaculate’s twenty-million gold, it seems, wouldn’t have been enough to get them on the Abyss Express by normal means. It had only been thanks to Byleth’s steady friendship with these four that space had been made for them, as stowaways of sorts. Briefly, Dimitri entertains the idea of using the Blaiddyd Pharmaceuticals fortune to buy tickets to this seeming fallen paradise. Maybe five years ago he would have done it, but now it seems entirely preposterous.

On the other side of the room, a reunion of sorts is going down. “Holst? Holst Goneril?” Claude is saying incredulously. “Holy shit, I live with his sister.”

“No way,” says the shirtless man, who introduced himself as Balthus earlier with a flourish. “Hilda motherfucking Goneril, who would have thought? How’s she doing nowadays? I haven’t heard from her in  _ years.” _

“Oh, no one has, she eloped with her high school sweetheart as soon as we all graduated. No way.  _ You’re _ Holst’s legendary vanished fiance?”

Balthus grins, scratching the back of his head. “I guess I am. I mean, it wasn’t of my own volition, shit caught up to me. Now I earn my keep here.” His smile grows equal parts fond and bittersweet, like he’s savouring the aftermath of his own decisions. “And while there’s nothing wrong with that… I mean, Holst probably doesn’t want me back, anyway.”

“Are you kidding me? Holst pines about you to Hilda on the phone  _ all the time, _ and then she complains to  _ me _ about it.” Claude shakes his head. “Dude, he misses you. I don’t know what loose ends you’ve got left to tie up, but if ever there comes a day when you think you’re ready, go back to him.”

“Gee, you really think?”

Hapi snorts. She’s taken to sitting crosslegged with her feet propped up on her thighs, which Dimitri supposes counts as “normal” for her based on the way Constance joins her on the bench. “Some serious shit’s gonna have to change for B to go back,” she says, one hand wrapped around her wife’s waist. It’s an affectionate gesture tinged with a protective undertone; what have they faced before they were adopted into the strange little family of the Abyss Express? “Starting with crests.”

“What do you mean?”

Her gaze is only a little unsettling as she levels him with a look. “Okay, Didi—can I call you Didi?—I don’t know where you came from in life, but imagine for a hot second you’ve got a crest, and your crest keeps, I dunno, some kind of dirty receipts on your family locked down. Then the people your pops and your uncle pissed off twenty years ago come hunting you down for it, and because you can’t do anything else about it you pay the fucking ransom so they don’t shoot your fiance while he’s sleeping and then start selling yourself to pay for his life, all while he doesn’t know a damn thing.”

Constance hums. “Our dear Balthus… is somewhat torn,” she says. “All four of us are vanished persons, you know, still listed as missing or dead, or just outright no longer existing.”

“Like Byleth.”

“Like Chatterbox,” Hapi murmurs, face buried in Constance’s shoulder.

“I don’t have anyone left above ground anymore. Neither do Hapi or Yuri. Balthus is something of an odd case among us in that he stays here for  _ their _ safety.” Constance smiles fondly. “His mom, his sisters, his fiance. He speaks little of them unless you get get enough alcohol into him, and even then it is hard to parse the words, but it’s clear he cares.”

“Everyone shut up,” Byleth announces, voice still soft but commanding respect. She’s taken her seat at Yuri’s side, in the same familiar sprawl that still reeks of hotel pajamas and couch cushions. “Balthus’s act is starting.”

Dimitri looks up. Everyone else is seated too, from Edelgard on Constance’s other side to Claude on Dimitri’s, and the lights dim and the spotlight hits the stage as Balthus wraps one muscled leg around the pole and swings around. Music flares up, and the world flies into neon.  _ This, too, feels like an imitation of cyberspace, _ he muses as Byleth and the Abyss Express natives start cheering,  _ a replica of the adrenaline and the buzz. _

Then Hapi’s words come flooding back,  _ you start selling yourself to pay for his life, all while he doesn’t know a damn thing, _ and it collides mixes with Yuri’s  _ I’ve had sex workers, vanished people, folks struggling to pay rent come to me crying. _ The Abyss Express isn’t some kind of paradise—at best, it’s an oasis, a breath of fresh air before the world’s cruelties press in once again.

_ What a  _ wonderful _ fucking world, _ Dimitri thinks, and joins in the festivities.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have i ever mentioned that i love Dedue? he's just. such an excellent man. i think the fact that his love is unconditional is very awesome of him.  
> happy end of nanowrimo, friends! as expected, _Babylon_ will continue past the month of november. updates might be a bit slower as i get slammed by a veritable brick of finals, but i fully intend to get this fic done. for those wondering, i did hit 50k - some of it is just a bit ahead of where the story currently is!  
> married hapicoco is really my ultimate endgame pairing. i wrote a sonnet based on them for my english course a few months ago and my professor marked it 10/10 which is how you know hapicoco is truly the Good Kush. also this is an nb!Yuri appreciating house. talk to me about Balthus's stellar upper body strength because ya girl has Weak Elbows and couldn't pole dance if she tried  
> i'm going to go sleep because i stayed up until 4 am yesterday reading fic. moral of nanowrimo is to keep writing. y'all awesome and sexy. peace

**Author's Note:**

> find me on Twitter @MargDaemonelix if you want to see me vaguepost about This Is How You Lose The Time War, on Instagram @margaritadaemonelix if you want to see me literally never post anything, or on Instagram @matchamargarita if you want to see my crochet endeavours!


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